Industrial techniques help reduce hospital-acquired infection.

learning lab for healthcare improvement, since healthcare is the region’s largest economic sector, employing one in eight workers and conducting more than $7.2 billion in business. The region is a national healthcare microcosm, as it struggles with high healthcare costs, a malpractice crisis, increasing numbers of uninsured people, and issues of patient safety. In 1997, the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiative (PRHI) convened an array of the region’s healthcare stakeholders to ask: Could Southwestern Pennsylvania, working and learning together as a region, make healthcare safer and better? PRHI has since become a community resource, a consortium of 44 hospitals, four major insurers, dozens of large and small business healthcare purchasers, corporate and civic leaders, and elected officials, working toward the goal of improving healthcare quality for patients, and improving the financial picture for those who pay for it.