The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has announced the launch of a national Patient Care program through which it will award as much as $500 million in grants over ten years.

The program, which aims to eliminate all preventable harms to patients, will focus on meaningfully engaging patients and their families in their own health care and in developing a systems approach that optimally reconfigures inter-professional teams, processes, and technology in support of that engagement. If successful, the work should also help drive down the cost of health care.

To that end, the Patient Care program will fund research and clinical projects that fully integrate the two areas and will look to collaborate with like-minded organizations. The program already has awarded $8.9 million in support of a strategic partnership with the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality, and is working with the Institute of Medicine, RAND Corporation, Stanford University, University of California, San Francisco, and others.

"Improvements in patient care will be more significant and lasting if patients and their families are actively engaged — especially if we reconfigure clinical processes, care teams, and technology into an integrated whole to focus on patient safety," said George Bo-Linn, the Moore Foundation's chief program officer for the program. "Much improvement has occurred, but too many patients still suffer from lapses in quality and safety. It's ambitious to attempt to prevent all harm, but we must strive for no less."