Berry dean fixes mistakes before they happen

It’s not often a lunch invitation turns into much more than a quick meal and good conversation. For Dr. John Grout, the dean of Berry College’s Campbell School of Business, a lunch invitation 12 years ago ended up changing his life.

Who knows how many lives that lunch conversation has saved?

It was in 1995 that Grout, then a professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, accepted an invitation from a pair of doctors at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School to join them for lunch. The doctors were creating a proposal based on error reporting in blood transfusions for the National Institutes of Health, and they were looking for assistance from Grout, who already was one of the nation’s leaders in the research of “mistake proofing.”

Since that afternoon, Grout has devoted much of his time to mistake-proofing the health care industry. His work is so respected that he recently was asked to author a book for the Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

The result, Mistake-Proofing the Design of Health Care Processes, is now available to health care practitioners worldwide. It includes 150 existing examples of mistake-proofing in the medical profession.

The text has raised some questions, Grout says. The first one he often receives about the book regards its purpose.

“I’ve been asked if it is meant to be a catalog of examples or a catalyst for more examples,” he said. “My answer, of course, is both. It has a large amount of examples but I really believe that in the future, this book will be used as a catalyst to create even more examples.”

Grout said he doesn’t expect the book to become an overnight sensation. But over time, he believes, it will make an impact.

“This is very new to medicine. This is not one of those books where they will say, ‘Look what just came out!’ This is something they will grow into. The real test is what happens in the next three to five years. I don’t look at it and think, ‘If this doesn’t get big in the next six months, there’s a problem.’

“There’s a huge benefit for the worker – it makes him more at-home while he’s at work and creates a less stressful environment. Mistake-proofing helps free medical professionals’ minds from an endless stream of details on how to do their job and helps patients get better more rapidly.”

So far, local medical practitioners have been able to see firsthand the positive results of mistake-proofing their environment.

“With mistake-proofing, the human element doesn’t have to become involved,” says Sonny Rigas, chief operating officer at Floyd Medical Center. “If mistake-proofing is automatically built into things, then we don’t have to think about making a costly mistake.

“We use a lot of different mistake-proofing measures” at Floyd, Rigas says. “For example, a portable x-ray machine cannot be moved unless a drive bar on the machine is depressed. There is an automatic exposure control on radiation devices that protects patients from receiving more radiation than what is prescribed. Those are a few big examples.

“There are more basic examples, too,” Rigas says. “We use bar code readers throughout the facility. There are lights over doors to indicate there is a procedure taking place inside that room. We use wristbands. There are examples of mistake-proofing all over in the health care industry, and specifically here.”

For Grout, mistake-proofing health care environments is an opportunity to assist a large group of professionals for which he holds a great deal of respect.

“I’ve been working with a lot of medical professionals over the past several years, and I’ve been so impressed by how much they care about their patients,” Grout says. “I don’t ever want it (mistake-proofing) viewed as denigrating those folks. They work in an environment that’s not designed for mistake-proofing, and errors can happen because of that. These are professionals doing the best they can, and ways are being designed to help them do it even better.”

Many of those new designs may be viewed on Grout’s Website, which also features a link to a wiki that he says will serve as a sort of “Volume 2” to his book and allow other users to post their mistake-proofing designs.

Grout’s launch into the world of mistake-proofing came well before that lunch invitation.

“I first became interested in mistake-proofing from a manufacturing perspective,” he says. “I taught a class in quality management at SMU. In preparing for that course, I really became fascinated with the subject of mistake-proofing. I like the inventive aspect to creating mistake-proofing devices.”

Grout also likes what he sees happening at the Campbell School of Business, which last year became one of just 549 business schools worldwide to be accredited by the prestigious Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.

“Now we are poised to move forward in new and better ways,” Grout says. “We’ve never had a stronger faculty then we have now. My job is to assist the faculty in making the Campbell School of Business better and better in the coming years. That will happen.”

Turns out, it doesn’t take a lunch invitation to get Grout excited about the future.

Originally appeared in The Druck Report, a Northwest Georgia business magazine, in 2007.