A research project of Vident Partners
Who publishes this, and who pays for it →
Who publishes The Patient Safety Standards Project, and who pays for it
An authority page that hides its owner is worth less than one that names it. This page states both, along with the rules the Center is written under.
The Patient Safety Standards Project is published and funded by Vident Partners, an expert witness referral firm. It is a section of videntpartners.com, not a separate publisher, and the ownership line appears in the header of every page it contains.
Vident Partners is compensated when an attorney engages an expert through its referral service. That is the commercial interest behind this publication, and it is stated here rather than left to be discovered.
Ownership
Who publishes this
The Patient Safety Standards Project is published by Vident Partners, an expert witness referral firm founded in 2005 and based in Dallas, Texas. It is not a separate company, a nonprofit, an academic institute, or an independent journal. It is a section of videntpartners.com, and it says so in the header of every page it contains.
We publish it under our own name on purpose. The experts who anchor this Center will list what they write here among their publications when they are retained, and opposing counsel will read those disclosures and follow the link. There is nothing on these pages we would not want them to find, and nothing about who publishes it that we would rather they did not know.
Funding
Who pays for it
Vident Partners funds this Center in full. The Center accepts no advertising, no sponsorship, and no third-party funding of any kind. It takes no money from hospitals or health systems, from malpractice insurers, from patient safety organizations, from trade associations, or from plaintiff or defense firms.
Vident Partners is compensated when an attorney engages an expert through our referral service. That is our business, and it is the commercial interest behind this publication. Reading anything here costs nothing and obligates nothing, and the initial consultation is complimentary.
Editorial policy
How pages are written and corrected
Every factual assertion on a Center page carries a numbered citation to a primary source — a statute, a regulation, a court opinion, a federal dataset, agency guidance, or a peer-reviewed paper. Secondary commentary is not cited in place of the source underneath it.
Every cited URL is checked before publication and rechecked whenever a page is revised. A reference that cannot be opened is not a reference.
Voluntary standards are labeled voluntary. The Leapfrog Never Events Policy, the CANDOR process, and RCA² are influential written national standards that no hospital is compelled by law to adopt, and this Center says so wherever it relies on them rather than allowing them to read as legal requirements. Where reporting is voluntary but analysis is mandatory — as with sentinel events — the page says which is which.
Regulatory statements are dated. Section 482.21 was amended on November 27, 2024, adding a maternal health standard effective January 1, 2027 and moving executive responsibilities to paragraph (f); a page describing a requirement names the version it describes.
Where an obligation varies by state — disclosure statutes, apology-law protections, peer review and patient safety work product privilege, and the tolling effect of concealment — the page says that the analysis is forum-specific instead of stating a national rule that does not exist.
The Center takes no position on the outcome of any case. Federal physician reviewers judged 56 percent of hospital harm events not preventable, occurring even though providers followed proper procedures. Where the authority favors healthcare organizations, the page says so.
Corrections are made on the page rather than silently. When a figure changes because the underlying dataset was revised, the figure and its citation are updated together.
Expert selection
How anchor experts are selected
Anchor experts are selected on credentials and operating record in the specific question at issue — not on availability, and not on how often they have testified.
This Center is deliberately explicit about scope. Its anchor answers how an institution ran its safety program and whether its review of an event was competently performed. Where a matter turns on whether the treating clinician met the standard of care in their own specialty, Vident Partners places that expert from its wider network rather than stretching an anchor beyond their field. In most of these matters both experts are needed.
The Center states an anchor's litigation experience accurately, including where it is limited. An expert whose depth is operational rather than forensic is described that way, because the alternative is a disclosure that opposing counsel will correct in front of a jury.
Anchor experts do not direct the Center's editorial content, and nothing published here is written to support a position in a pending matter.
Appearing here is not an endorsement of any opinion an expert may offer in any particular case. Retention decisions belong to counsel.
Standing rule
The sourcing rule
No claim without a citation. If a statement cannot be traced to a primary source a reader can open, it does not go on the page — however obviously true it seems.
A population figure is not an individual finding. A federal harm rate measured across a national sample of Medicare admissions is never presented as though it resolves what happened to one patient in one hospital on one night.
A number is reported with the conditions that produced it: the sampling method, the period covered, the review process, and what the study counted. The OIG's 25 percent figure covers harm events among a sample of 770 Medicare patients discharged in October 2018 and combines adverse events with temporary harm events, and this Center says so every time it uses the number. The 2010 and 2022 OIG studies used different criteria and are not presented as a trend.
Where a source publishes its own caution about its data, that caution is reproduced rather than dropped. AHRQ states that its patient safety culture database is not representative of all U.S. hospitals, and this Center repeats that wherever it uses the data.
An accreditation requirement is quoted from the accreditor's own published manual or policy, with the edition and date named. Where this Center has not verified current standard text against that manual, it attributes the statement to the source it did verify and says what remains unconfirmed.
The Center currently cites 46 primary sources. They are listed in full, with live links, on the references page.
Corrections, questions, and disagreements
If something on a The Patient Safety Standards Project page is wrong, out of date, or reads as advocacy rather than evidence, tell us and we will fix it on the page. If you are working a matter and need an expert, the consultation is complimentary.