Challenges and Opportunities of Patient Safety Event Reporting

The World Health Organization (WHO) announced the first-ever World Patient Safety Day on September 17, 2019, which remarks a global campaign to create an awareness of patient safety and urges people to show their commitment to making healthcare safer. Reporting medical incidents or patient safety events (PSE) has been recommended as an effective approach for the detection of patterns, discovery of underlying factors, and generation of solutions. It is believed that PSE reporting systems (e-reporting) could be a good resource to share and to learn from the reporting if the event data are collected in a properly structured format. Unfortunately, the prevalence of underreporting and low quality of the reports have become barriers to ultimately achieve the goal of preventing and reducing medical incidents. This chapter describes the efforts that have been made to improve e-reporting through informatics approaches, including a review of PSE taxonomies and conceptual frameworks, studies of medication events, patient falls, and PSE involved in health information technologies, as well as discussions of design requirements for future e-reporting systems.