Our mission to improve the experience and outcomes of patient care originates from our co-founder, Betty Irene Moore. Based on her own experience in the hospital, and in caring for family members who have been hospitalized, Betty saw an opportunity to improve the quality and safety of care delivered in the San Francisco Bay Area. Through an effort spanning more than a decade, our Betty Irene Moore Nursing Initiative engaged bedside nurses to lead improvement efforts that successfully changed the way hospitals provide care throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and greater Sacramento region. We continue this legacy by providing nurses with education and training through the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing at the University of California, Davis and the Family Caregiving Institute.
Patient safety and the quality of care remain an important focus of our ongoing work. Through our Diagnostic Excellence Initiative – an area that has so far not received as much funding or attention as it warrants – we aim to reduce erroneous or delayed diagnoses, reduce costs and redundancy in the diagnostic process, improve health outcomes and save lives. Through this initiative, we are helping to develop and validate new measures for diagnostic performance, building professional expertise in diagnosis, and capitalizing in new and emerging technologies. Currently, health care systems are unable to systemically measure diagnostic performance in real time, which limits the ability to quantify performance and guide improvements.
We recently completed a set of activities aimed at improving the caring for people with serious illness (people living with multiple chronic conditions and who are also limited in their ability to perform common everyday activities). We have also supported work in medication safety, and helped early-career investigators engage patients and families in their care, as well as other special projects aimed at enhancing the experience and outcomes of patient care.