Patient Care
Our aim is to improve the experience and outcomes of patient care. We accomplish this through our initiative in diagnostic excellence, our work in serious illness care and through other special projects.
Our mission to improve the experience and outcomes of patient care originates from our co-founder, Betty Irene Moore. Based on her own experience in the hospital, and in caring for family members who have been hospitalized, Betty saw an opportunity to improve the quality and safety of care delivered in the San Francisco Bay Area. Through an effort spanning more than a decade, our Betty Irene Moore Nursing Initiative engaged bedside nurses to lead improvement efforts that successfully changed the way hospitals provide care throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and greater Sacramento.
In August 2018, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation approved a six year, $85 million investment in the Diagnostic Excellence Initiative. The goal of the initiative is to reduce harm from erroneous or delayed diagnoses, reduce costs and redundancy in the diagnostic process, improve health outcomes and save lives.
Achieving excellence in diagnosis goes beyond avoiding errors and includes consideration of cost, timeliness and patient convenience. Designing an optimal diagnostic process will require a careful balance among these competing demands.
Three clinical categories – acute vascular events, infections and cancers – are responsible for a disproportionate share of serious harm and preventable death because of sub-optimal diagnosis. As a result, our initiative will concentrate on these three disease categories.
One of our primary strategies is helping to develop and validate new measures for diagnostic performance. Currently, health care systems are unable to systemically measure diagnostic performance in real time, which limits the ability to quantify performance and guide improvements. As the adage goes, “you can’t improve what you can’t measure.” In an effort to spur innovation in diagnostic performance measurement, we are pleased to announce a Request for Ideas. Click below for more details and to apply!