The Office of the National Coordinator for healthcare information technology (HIT) is looking for an application to make it easier to report safety incidents in hospital and ambulatory settings.
The Reporting Patient Safety Events Challenge has put out a call for a solution to make it “easier for any individual to file a report electronically, using Common Formats but allowing for additional elements and narratives,” according to a notice published April 11 in the Federal Register.
The challenge is set up to spur development of platform-neutral HIT apps that can make it easier for staff to report harm, no matter how small, to patients.
“It must allow the hospital quality and risk management staff to add information from follow-up investigation, submit reports as appropriate to patient safety organizations, the state, or the FDA (which may differ and need to be tracked separately), and track follow-up activities,” the notice reads.
Developers of the application are charged with “increasing ease of reporting to the provider or parent organization; enabling importation, including screen shots, from EHRs, PHRs and other information systems; capturing useful demographic information and other relevant information such as diagnoses; procuring information about the type of organization submitting the report; enabling the option to submit the report to non-PSO public health or health oversight organizations, and leverage and extend standards and services of the Nationwide Health Information Network.”
Reporting safety incidents has sometimes been difficult in the past. They rely on those involved in the events to provide detailed information, and these may feel like “whistleblowers,” or fear for their jobs.
And it’s been going on globally for quite some time. Peter Walsh, chief executive of the charity Action Against Medical Accidents, said many in the UK were choosing not to own up to such incidents, despite a law that had been in place since April 2010, requiring them to do so.
Stephen Adams writes in The Telegraph that National Patient Safety Agency figures released in 2011 showed “an 8.5 per cent increase in the total number of reported incidents in the National Health Service in England, between April to September 2010 and October to March 2011.” Even though 69 percent of such incidents result in "no harm," (69 per cent), low harm (24 percent), or "moderate harm" (six), even just one percent could result in "death or severe harm.”
A new electronic incident reporting and complaints handling system has dramatically reduced the number of complaints relating to medical errors in the AZ Sint-Lucas hospital in Bruges, Belgium, according to epractice.eu.com.
The patient safety software was put in place in early November 2010 and by 2011, the number of incidents reported at the hospital – as the website reports, the first in mainland Europe to implement this kind of system – tripled, and doubled again in the following eight months.
But hospitals with this kind of experience are not alarmed. It means that staff is taking the subject seriously and sometimes it even results in such benefits as an increased ability to analyze trends in patient safety flaws and where attention must be paid.
Edited by
Carrie Schmelkin
