Stop Wasting Time on 100% Reliability
The term “high reliability” is often misunderstood in health care. “Health care requires reliable processes — that is, processes that function exactly as designed, all of the time. What may come as a surprise to some,” writes IHI Senior Fellow Dr. Roger Resar, “is that these processes don’t have to be 100 percent reliable.” In this post to the IHI Blog, Resar notes that health care organizations sometimes put too much emphasis on 100 percent reliability, and he argues instead for the value of less-than-perfect design. Although 100 percent reliability does not have to be the process goal, Resar emphasizes, it should always be the outcome goal — because preventing harm to patients is the ultimate aim. He discusses the benefits of less-than-perfect design and offers keys to sustaining the reliability of processes over time. Dr. Resar co-authored the 2004 IHI white paper, Improving the Reliability of Health Care, and is faculty for IHI's upcoming seminar, How to Design Reliable Processes in Health Care.