Improving patient safety reporting with the common formats: Common data representation for Patient Safety Organizations.
Medical errors and patient safety issues remain a significant problem for the healthcare industry in the United States. The Institute of Medicine report To Err is Human reported that there were as many as 98,000 deaths per year due to medical error as of 1999. Many authors and government officials believe that the first step on the path to improvement in patient safety is more comprehensive collection and analysis of patient safety events. The belief is that this will enable safety improvements based on data showing the nature and frequency of events that occur, and the effectiveness of interventions. This systematization of healthcare practice can be a step in the right direction toward a value based, safety conscious and effective healthcare system. To help standardize this reporting and analysis, AHRQ created Common Formats for Patient Safety data collection and reporting. This manuscript describes the development of patient safety reporting and learning through the Patient Safety Organizations (PSO)s and the Common Formats and gives readers an overview of how the system is expected to function and the breadth of development of the Common Formats to date.
Department of Biomedical Informatics, Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, University at Buffalo, SUNY, United States. Electronic address: Elkinp@buffalo.edu.
Peter L
PL
Elkin
Henry Johnson Healthcare Consulting LLC, Tucson, AZ, United States.
Henry C
HC
Johnson
KattenMuchinRosenman, LLP, United States.
Michael R
MR
Callahan
Division of Clinical Epidemiology, University of Utah School of Medicine, United States; Pascal Metrics PSO, United States.
David C
DC
Classen
D000068598:Data Accuracy; D003625:Data Collection; D006801:Humans; D019300:Medical Errors; D061214:Patient Safety; D014481:United States
Human factors engineering; Patient safety; Public health informatics; Standarization of data entry