An Observational Study of Disparities in Voluntary Event Reporting in a Large Academic Health System

Identifying and preventing patient safety events is a goal for institutions that provide quality care; understanding and mitigating disparities in care is another. The mainstay of safety event detection, voluntary event reporting (VER), is prone to bias and under-reporting; previous research suggests this creates disparities in reported events. We aim to explore disparities in voluntary event reporting that may exist in a large, academic health system.

We conducted a retrospective review of inpatient-associated safety events submitted to our health system's VER system from April 2021 to July 2022 and compared the cohort's demographics to those of all admitted patients during the same period.

Pediatric patients, who are over-represented in the overall VER system (23% vs. 20%, P <0.001), are under-represented among most harmful events ( P <0.001). Female patients, who are under-represented in the VER system (50.1% vs. 56.5%, P <0.001), remain so only in lower harm events. Other groups are over-represented in the VER system, including patients who are English-speaking (93.8% vs. 92.9%), non-Hispanic or Latino (88.9% vs. 82.4%), Black/African American (33.3% vs. 28.7%), and from areas of high neighborhood deprivation (23.5% vs. 18.9%) (all P <0.001).

Disparities in VER were observed in a large academic health system. We conducted a broad analysis, including novel variables that have yet to be evaluated robustly in the literature, and we do find important disparities in these variables. Further research is needed to understand the mechanism for disparities to mitigate bias in reporting. Implementation of more objective methods of event detection may help reduce disparities.