Quality Management

Quality in Action

Life Flight Network continuously strives to perform beyond the expectations of our patients and healthcare partners to ensure they are receiving the level of care and service they deserve. Quality is at the core of everything we do as we continue to raise the bar of excellence in the industry, making us a national leader in air medical care. Life Flight Network maintains multiple national and international clinical, operational, and safety accreditations, recognized as the vanguard in the industry.

Our robust quality management program fortifies this commitment throughout the organization. Every department is provided with the tools to measure and report their own improvements and successes, helping us to establish, adhere to, and exceed industry standards as we work to save lives and improve patient outcomes.

We believe being a highly reliable organization is the path to achieving elite standards of quality and safety. Our relentless dedication to process improvement keeps us goal-oriented, culture-based, and system-focused. Our quality shines through our patient care practices, our rigorous training protocols, our state-of-the-art equipment, and our compassion for the people we serve. We exist for one reason: to save lives. And for that, nothing but the best will do.

Improvement Science

The road to high reliability is paved with Improvement Science. We employ Improvement Science to understand variation, study systems, and implement strategies to achieve desired outcomes. Life Flight Network’s Quality Management department uses four key domains to achieve and sustain high reliability:

Get the Roadmap to High Reliability:

A Just Culture

A Just Culture is a learning, reporting, and informed culture. A Just Culture refers to a way of thinking that promotes a questioning attitude. It is resistant to complacency and is committed to excellence.

Human Factors

Human factors consider how humans interact in the workplace and why they interact the way they do. Our goal at Life Flight Network is to design systems that make it easy to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing.

Human Organizational Performance

Human organizational performance provides a framework of thought and action for continuous improvement, centered on identifying and learning from errors.

Learning Teams

Learning teams are utilized to improve current systems to respond to failure or human error. Our teams ask questions to move away from blame and toward system improvements. We acknowledge that without learning, failure will be repeated. Our employees—and more importantly our front-line staff—are critical to solving problems and implementing change.

Continuous Quality Improvement

Life Flight Network has a robust quality reporting system that is recognized as the foundation of our quality management program. Life Flight Network’s quality management team utilizes a standardized approach for improvement and adhere to the Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) model.

Quality Management Indicators Tracked:

MONITORING FOR BETTER OUTCOMES

Since 2017, Life Flight Network has been a participating member of the GAMUT QI Collaborative. As a member of the 365 United States and 23 international air and ground medical transport organizations, we are utilizing quality metrics to improve the care and safety of our patients. Our partnership in GAMUT allows us to track and report on over 40 quality metrics, including:

Advanced Airway Management
Blood Administration/Blood Products
Clinical Management
Efficiency
Maternal Transports
Medical Documentation
Patient and Crew Safety

Professional Presentations with National Healthcare Organizations

We are made better by the people and organizations that work with us.

An Enduring Commitment to
Organizational Excellence

Safety

Safety and risk management are our core philosophies. To best address the pressing challenges of safe transport for injured and critically ill patients by air or ground, our focus on safety remains rigorous. Our commitment to safety is unrelenting.

Communications Center

Our state-of the-art Communications Center is located at Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise, Idaho. Trained communications specialists process more than 100,000 phone calls each month from EMS, hospital, and public safety dispatch centers.

Clinical

We were born out of a clinical setting and built on the need to bring ICU-level care to every patient. Wherever they may be in our service area. Our equipment is the most advanced in the industry and whether in the air or on the ground it is staffed with the most experienced critical care teams and flight personnel from strategic bases throughout the four states we serve.

Training & Education

Our training protocols and continuing education programs are our defining attributes. Training begins the moment a new employee walks through the door and the culture of learning never ends. We bring what we learn in every scenario to mitigate future risk, maximize safety, and stay at the ready.