In Honor of Patient Safety Awareness Week: A Message from Dr. Hayley Burgess

In honor of Patient Safety Awareness Week, I want to take a moment to say thank you. Thank you for the dedication, ingenuity, and compassion you consistently demonstrate as you work every day to keep patients safe.

For more than 20 years, VigiLanz has put patient safety and wellbeing at the heart of everything we do, and we remain committed to providing our pharmacists, infection preventionists, researchers, and safety professionals with the tools and the support you need to make a difference at your hospitals. We are so proud of the work you are doing!

While medical errors remain all too common in the United States, much progress has been made in recent years. It is a privilege to work in an environment that promotes a safe culture – where mistakes can occur and the system can pause to evaluate processes, staffing constraints, and contributing human factors.

However, the startling reality is that many errors go unreported. At VigiLanz, we strive to create technology that not only helps clinical teams anticipate, prevent, and respond to adverse events – but also assists in the documentation and capture of both voluntarily reported and automatically detected safety incidents. Still, we recognize that identifying issues is not enough, and that acting on prevention with this new knowledge is imperative to growing trust from our staff and protecting future patients.

In my previous role, I was a system pharmacy leader. I watched my pharmacists struggle with antiquated reporting and disparate data as they worked to find interventions that could improve patient care. When I discovered VigiLanz, it changed everything! At last, we had standard pharmacy workflow solutions that could assist my team with harm prevention, and finally I had valid data to understand how, when, and where medication management could be improved. I became such a big believer in the innovations that technology can bring when used in synergy with the medical record, and the rest is history.

Today, I have the privilege of leading the operations of the VigiLanz organization, where every day I get to pursue my passion of preventing patient harm and reducing the burden on clinicians. I truly believe that patient safety should be at the heart of every hospital’s innovation strategy, just like it’s at the heart of the VigiLanz mission – and that there’s never been a greater need for advancements in healthcare technology to help us keep our patients safe. It is an honor to do this work and serve you in this way! Thank you for your partnership and your commitment to making a difference, and I look forward to what we can accomplish together.

Hayley Burgess
Chief Operating Officer + Chief Clinical Officer