We’re Former AHRQ Leaders. Patient Safety Must Never be Partisan.

Americans understandably worry about affording healthcare. But they should also be concerned about its safety. Every day patients are harmed — not due to lack of medical advancement, but because our health system too often fails to learn from its own mistakes. As a result, medical errors are estimated to be the third leading cause of death behind only heart disease and cancer. Many patients assume our health system continually learns how to prevent these avoidable harms. That’s the goal, but that learning doesn’t happen by accident.

There is a little-known federal agency dedicated to conducting and funding scientific research that makes patient care safer: the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). As a 2005 editorial in the Washington Post commented, AHRQ “is one of the few institutions in the country that does regular, neutral investigations of best medical practices.”

AHRQ, established with bipartisan support in Congress, has a mandate that evolved to study how and why patients are harmed; develop practical tools for hospitals, clinicians, and patients; measure quality; identify best practices; and translate research into everyday care. Implementing safe care practices is a win-win for all — avoiding harm and enhancing affordability.

But this summer, there has been a large wave of AHRQ grant cancellations, which will halt research into pressing patient safety issues.

As former AHRQ director and senior legislative leader serving under presidents George Bush and Barack Obama and HHS secretaries Tommy Thompson, Mike Leavitt, and Kathleen Sebelius, we had strong bipartisan support for efforts to reduce medical errors; eliminate waste; improve healthcare value and transparency; and strengthen primary care. We both served in Republican and Democratic administrations and had our share of disagreements. But one principle never divided us and political leaders: patients should not be injured by the care meant to heal them. This commitment resulted in fewer preventable injuries, more lives saved, reduced Medicare and Medicaid spending for avoidable harm, and improved care at rural hospitals.

We have learned that patient safety events are typically the result of poorly designed systems and inadequate team work rather than “bad actors.” In response, AHRQ has led broad efforts to educate the public, health professionals, and hospitals about actions they could take to make care safer, while also investing in groundbreaking research and training programs to support implementation of promising practices at scale.

Advancements in patient safety have led to notable decreases in hospital-associated infections across the country. For example, Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit implemented AHRQ’s Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Program, achieving a 90% reduction in Clostridioides difficile (C. diff) infections in its nephrology unit since January 2023. More broadly, CDC data showed a 27% decrease in hospital-associated infections nationwide from 2015 to 2023, driven primarily by declines in C. diff infections. Furthermore, research supported by AHRQ has led to improvements in medication safety; evaluation and dissemination of approaches to enhance teamwork and communication, including safe transitions from hospital to home; and prevention of diagnostic errors, which can impede the timely treatment of serious illnesses such as cancer.

In short, many of the biggest improvements in patient safety have not come from new drugs, devices, or procedures, but from learning how to deliver care effectively and consistently. As more care transitions from hospitals to ambulatory care settings, that learning is more important than ever. Yet research at the University of Pittsburgh on how intensive care unit patients can safely transition back home was halted by the Trump administration’s mass termination of AHRQ’s research grants. This will jeopardize patients and health professionals by reducing essential evidence for improving care, slowing progress on decreasing diagnostic errors, and hindering the safe use of new tools, such as artificial intelligence (AI) in patient care.

As a recent MedPage Today Perspective noted, AI can be a powerful tool for assisting clinicians, but learning how to do that well is essential. Yet, ongoing research at the University of Wisconsin, which was evaluating the use of AI to enhance safety and the experience for hospitalized children and their families, was also discontinued by the recent cuts. Cancelling AHRQ grants disrupts promising research and careers, which may ultimately affect patient outcomes.

Every individual and family wants to be confident that surgery and procedures are safe, medication mistakes are rare, avoidable infections are prevented, and that all health professionals contributing to their care closely coordinate and communicate with them early and often. This is especially important to achieve smoother care for aging patients and those with chronic illnesses. These improvements come from investment in research and learning systems — not luck.

Preventing patient harm from medical care should never be a partisan cause. No parent taking a child to the emergency department, no veteran undergoing surgery, and no older adult recovering at home wants care that is merely available. They want care that is safe and effective. That goal has never belonged to one political party — and it shouldn’t start now.