Using portable digital technology for clinical care and critical incidents: a new model

The number of patients suffering adverse incidents during treatment in hospitals is not declining. The cost of this poor safety record in Australia is 1 billion dollars to 4.7 billion dollars each year. Quality and safety initiatives focus on promoting adverse event reporting. Major problems include poor reporting of adverse events and lack of clinician involvement. We propose a model for clinician-led reporting based on secure transmission of encrypted data from a programmed personal digital assistant (PDA) to a secure database, leading to automated analysis of clinician-performance data. The programmed PDA also facilitates the reporting of critical incidents. All critical incidents are automatically fed back by email to the organisational quality managers.