To improve patient safety and outcomes, clinicians should report in detail when something goes wrong. But many providers report the minimum or nothing at all out of fear that the details will be subpoenaed, used in a malpractice case or surfaced during litigation.
This results in organizations operating with an incomplete picture of what’s happening in their specialty care network. Without tracking and troubleshooting, systemic problems persist.
To ensure clinical appropriateness and a quality network, Lantern established the Lantern Quality and Safety Institute, a Patient Safety Organization (PSO).
The impact on specialists, members and patient safety runs deeper than a certification.
What is a PSO?
A PSO is a federally created entity, authorized by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), that allows clinicians to report safety concerns without fear of litigation. Specifically, the protections include:
- Privilege: The data cannot be introduced as evidence in any state or federal court proceeding.
- Confidentiality: The data can only be disclosed through a narrow set of exceptions defined in the statute.
Together, these protections remove the single biggest barrier to honest reporting. When clinicians are no longer weighing every detail against potential legal exposure, they document what actually happened. That changes everything about what a network can learn and act upon.
Lantern is the first and only independent Center of Excellence to operate an AHRQ-certified PSO.
“When clinicians know their reports are protected, they report more openly,” said Jason Tibbels, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Lantern. “The Lantern Quality and Safety Institute aggregates this data across providers to identify patterns that would be invisible at a single facility and recommends best practices to improve care nationwide. The result is a safer network that advances our consistently strong outcomes.”
The Lantern Quality and Safety Institute identifies systemic patterns across 2,000+ surgeons and 725+ facilities to identify patterns that would be invisible at a single facility, drive improvements network-wide and share best practices more broadly.
Why Did Lantern Create a PSO?
There are fewer than 150 AHRQ-listed PSOs in the country, and most of them are affiliated with large hospital systems. The Lantern Quality and Safety Institute is the first PSO established by an independent Center of Excellence.
When specialists report more openly, Lantern accumulates clinical intelligence that no claims-based system can access. By identifying the patterns, Lantern can then remove specialists not meeting excellence standards to strengthen the network over time.
“It’s not good enough just to invite someone and hope they do good work,” says Tibbels. “Any good quality program is iterative.”
The PSO is an important part of Lantern’s overall quality infrastructure. Lantern vets providers through a rigorous, specialist-first approach bolstered by our partnership with the Global Appropriateness Measures (GAM) Consortium. The PSO enables evaluation to be secure and adds a critical safety component.
A PSO is a structural advantage backed by federal law. It produces useful clinical intelligence that compounds over time. No amount of claims analytics can replicate what a PSO provides.
How Do You Know if a Network is Truly Committed to Quality?
Without a PSO, COEs rely on knowing what happened through billing codes. But claims alone sometimes don’t tell the full story. When clinicians have the ability to make protected reports, those networks gain the insight to understand why adverse events happened and how to prevent them in the future.
Lantern’s PSO is a commitment to building a network that gets safer and smarter with every case, every report and every year.
