U.S. ARMY GARRISON - YONGSAN, KOREA -- The Brian Allgood Army Community Hospital (BAACH) welcomed The Joint Commission (TJC) Center for Transforming Healthcare representatives and U.S. Army Medical Command (MEDCOM) leadership from June 28 to 29, 2017, to assess the BAACH's readiness to become a high reliability organization (HRO).

TJC is the nation's oldest and largest standards-setting and accrediting body in health care. BAACH has been accredited by TJC to have met all the standards as a health care organization after an on-site survey in May 2016.

BAACH didn't stop its initiative there, but has planned the site visit of Center for Transforming Healthcare representatives to step forward as a HRO. As one of the command strategic priorities, BAACH executive committee conducted a self-assessment named ORO 2.0™.

ORO 2.0™ is an online organizational assessment with resources designed to guide hospital leadership throughout the high reliability journey, specifically within the areas such as leadership commitment, safety culture and robust process improvement. The TJC Center for Transforming Healthcare team and BAACH command team discussed ways to build a performance improvement plan to help the organization achieve zero harm in all settings throughout the hospital.

BAACH is also planning to use a systematic approach to analyze specific breakdowns in care and discover its underlying causes to develop targeted solutions that solve these complex problems. Based on the result from the assessment, the quality management eepartment (QMD) and the command team came up with action plans to start its journey as a 'Zero Harm' facility. They plan to implement quality measure visual display boards in each and every section of the hospital to help the staff to communicate and keep the track of the quality and safety measures.

"We want to build a HRO but we also want to live it because what is more important is keeping the status of being a HRO so our beneficiaries can always count on us," said Adriane Brown, Chief QMD. "Human errors are possible but we should always be able to bounce back from it quickly for ourselves, be resilient and prevent the chances of the same error in advance by repetitive analysis and improvement."

"Starting this journey to zero harm facility is one of good examples that BAACH will never stop making efforts to provide high quality health care for our soldiers and the families," said Col. Erica Clarkson, BAACH commander. "BAACH plans to successfully implement all the performance improvement action plans lined up by end of this year to become a high reliability organization where patients can always expect to experience the safest and highest quality health care whichever clinic they visit in BAACH."