Minnesota, Pennsylvania to launch error-reporting systems
To learn from medical errors, the states will require reports on events that shouldn't have happened and those that almost happened.
By Andis Robeznieks, amednews staff. Oct. 6, 2003.
Minnesota and Pennsylvania have taken different approaches in efforts to reach the same goal: Increasing patient safety through reporting and analyzing medical errors.
Pennsylvania has set up an independent agency, the Patient Safety Authority, to collect and analyze data from both medical errors and "near miss" events, while Minnesota is now requiring hospitals to report any time one of 27 "never events" (such as wr
Medical error reporting systems are sometimes criticized because they can be misused to create unfair or misleading comparisons. Institutions that do the best job of reporting errors can be seen as more error-prone than those who keep mistakes under wr
"Some systems only reflect who reports and who doesn't," said Kenneth Kizer, MD, president of the Washington, D.C.-based National Quality Forum, which created the list of "never events" adopted into law by Minnesota legislators.
Supporters of the new programs, however, say eliminating harmful errors -- not score-keeping -- is the goal behind collecting the data.
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