Improving Patient Safety by Reusing Clinical Routine Data - An Expert Survey on Patient Safety Indicators

Patient safety is an important issue and receiving increasing attention. Information technology (IT) and IT-based strategies as the secondary use of already existing data within hospital information systems can help to improve patient safety.

To investigate experts' knowledge and opinions regarding relevant patient safety problems, their measurability in existing clinical routine data and potential challenges in the field. We also wanted to get an overview of already deployed indicators for patient safety.

Semi structured interviews with 20 experts from different healthcare domains were conducted and analyzed using a qualitative content analysis methodology.

The expert interviews offered a deeper insight into patient safety and quarried relevant patient safety problems including possibilities to measure them. The most often mentioned indicators were infection, complication and pressure ulcer.

From an experts' perspective there are several challenges but equally a high potential for improving patient safety by the use of health IT.