About

MRescue is a Quality Improvement Initiative housed within the University of Michigan's Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation (IHPI). IHPI is one of the nation’s leading academic institutes devoted to improving the quality, safety, and affordability of health care. MRescue aims to combat failure to rescue (FTR), defined as mortality following a major complication, by reducing cognitive bias and enhancing diagnostic skill.

We aim to do this through a multi-faceted approach. One component is Turning Points - an interactive (choose your own adventure), web-based application that presents brief patient scenarios to teach residents:

1. To identify potential cognitive biases during clinical decision-making
2. To enforce strategies to mitigate them

Turning Points achieves this through targeted training around anticipated deviations from "normal." The goal is:

1. To develop shared mental models
2. To allow front line clinicians to actively make contingency plans

Potential impact of this work:

1. To shed light on how healthcare organizations can be engaged to better sense, cope with, and respond to the unexpected and changing demands presented by clinically deteriorating post-surgical patients with life-threatening complications
2. To inform further development, testing and implementation of larger-scale rescue-focused initiatives, which could have a direct, population-level impact on reducing mortality in surgical patients

The conceptual framework for this work was developed by Dr. Amir Ghaferi and his colleagues in a Harvard Business Review article entitled The Next Wave of Hospital Innovation to Make Patients Safer.