title: Duke Surgery Patient Safety: an open-source application for anonymous reporting of adverse and near-miss surgical events.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Studies have shown that 4% of hospitalized patients suffer from an adverse event caused by the medical treatment administered. Some institutions have created systems to encourage medical workers to report these adverse events. However, these systems often prove to be inadequate and/or ineffective for reviewing the data collected and improving the outcomes in patient safety.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  To describe the Web-application Duke Surgery Patient Safety, designed for the anonymous reporting of adverse and near-miss events as well as scheduled reporting to surgeons and hospital administration. SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE: DSPS was developed primarily using Java language running on a Tomcat server and with MySQL database as its backend.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Formal and field usability tests were used to aid in development of DSPS. Extensive experience with DSPS at our institution indicate that DSPS is easy to learn and use, has good speed, provides needed functionality, and is well received by both adverse-event reporters and administrators.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  This is the first description of an open-source application for reporting patient safety, which allows the distribution of the application to other institutions in addition for its ability to adapt to the needs of different departments. DSPS provides a mechanism for anonymous reporting of adverse events and helps to administer Patient Safety initiatives.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The modifiable framework of DSPS allows adherence to evolving national data standards. The open-source design of DSPS permits surgical departments with existing reporting mechanisms to integrate them with DSPS. The DSPS application is distributed under the GNU General Public License.
authors.affiliation: Center for Excellence in Surgical Outcomes, Department of Surgery, Duke University Medical Center, DUMC 3094, Durham, NC 27710, USA. rpietro@duke.edu
authors.forename: Ricardo
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Pietrobon
authors.forename: Raquel
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Lima
authors.forename: Anand
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Shah
authors.forename: Danny O
authors.initials: DO
authors.lastname: Jacobs
authors.forename: Matthew
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Harker
authors.forename: Mariana
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: McCready
authors.forename: Henrique
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Martins
authors.forename: William
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Richardson