Is preventable harm the right patient safety metric?

Despite increasing attention and discussion, patient harm remains an important issue in health care. Defining and identifying harm remains challenging, and little standardization in approach exists. This summary describes an approach to identifying hospital-wide preventable harm with focused safety efforts using the Preventable Harm Index as a measure of progress and as a metric to motivate improvement. Our hospital's significant decrease in serious safety events, mortality, and preventable harm is outlined.