Patient Safety in Radiology (2025)-Finding the Why: Strengthening Safety Through Cause Analysis - Understanding the Difference: Apparent Cause vs. Root Cause Analysis

Finding the Why: Strengthening Safety Through Cause Analysis - Understanding the Difference: Apparent Cause vs. Root Cause Analysis

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Video Transcription

Video Summary

Susan Rich from Emory Health Care presents on tools for analyzing healthcare incidents—events where patient care deviates from the intended path. The session differentiates between Apparent Cause Analysis (ACA) and Root Cause Analysis (RCA). ACAs address immediate, visible causes suitable for quick, low-risk fixes, while RCAs delve into systemic, underlying factors needing thorough investigation and sustainable solutions for serious events. Both use tools like flow charts, observations, timelines, and brainstorming; RCAs employ additional tools such as fault tree and barrier analyses. Emphasizing system thinking and human factors, analyses avoid blaming individuals, fostering a culture of safety and continuous improvement. Effective interventions prioritize strong system-level changes over weaker, human-dependent actions. Sustainability requires embedding changes into workflows and sharing learnings across teams to promote ongoing reliability. The goal is to understand why incidents occur to prevent recurrence, improve patient safety, and build resilient, high-reliability healthcare systems.

Keywords

GEMBA

direct observation

continuous improvement

Plan-Do-Study-Act

process improvement

Healthcare Incident Analysis

Apparent Cause Analysis (ACA)

Root Cause Analysis (RCA)

Patient Safety

System Thinking