Zero Safety Incidents: Measuring What Matters

Watch the full episode on YouTube.

One Number Is Never the Whole Answer

No single test makes a medication safe. Safety comes from a chain of checks: a review of each prescription, staff retraining every quarter, air and surface sampling, filter certification, and lab testing. Each check removes a little more uncertainty.

So when a batch was flagged for possible contamination, Micah didn’t take the result at face value. He quarantined the batch and sent samples to a second lab. The first lab later found an error in its own testing, and the second lab’s result came back clean. Measurements make mistakes too. The way to catch them is to check again.

The Wait Sets the Pace

“Time is money,” Micah said. The longer results take, the longer patients may wait for their medication, and some will go to another pharmacy. Cutting corners costs more later. We built our testing at Sapho Bio around that tension: shorter waits without skipped steps.

Doing it right also has a real cost. Even 30 seconds of hand washing is someone’s paid time.

Consistency Beats Any Single Reading

Outside work, Micah thinks of success as three cups: family, health, and work. When one runs low, he fills it back up. For health, his main metric is consistency. He tracks his sleep with an Oura ring, adds one rep a week in the gym, and adds one mile a week as he trains for an October marathon. A single reading tells you little. The trend shows where you’re headed.

Some Metrics Cost More Than They Save

Micah has seen retail pharmacy chains track how many prescriptions each pharmacist verifies per shift. The number goes up, and so does burnout. People leave, new staff need training, and tired pharmacists make mistakes. “Some people think their measurement is the most important,” he said. “But it’s just good to take a step back and see what’s most important.”

The Number He Wishes He Had

For Micah, the metric that matters most is zero safety incidents. The hard part is that the feedback never arrives right away. He wishes he could know, after a patient takes a medication, that they were safe and that the dose worked. On a Topgolf range you see where every shot lands. Medicine rarely works that way, and some of the most important measurements are ones nobody can take yet.

Watch the full conversation with Micah on YouTube and subscribe for new episodes of How It’s Measured.

Thank you to Micah for joining us for our first episode.