The Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority has released its 2015 Annual Report, which shows a standardization project the organization implemented has helped improve adverse event reporting.
The project included 28 guidelines meant to provide consistent standards to acute healthcare facilities across the state for determining whether occurrences met the statutory definitions of "serious events," "incidents" or "infrastructure failures."
The guidelines were implemented April 1, 2015. The authority also developed an online educational program for staff of the authority, Department of Health and healthcare facilities to ensure everyone had a common understanding of the principles.
Ultimately, the Pennsylvania PSA found the guidelines helped boost events reporting overall, which also helped the authority grasp how hospitals are performing on quality and safety. The authority highlighted improvements on the following three fronts.
1. Serious event reporting experienced a notable increase starting in April 2015, the month the new standards went into effect
2. The number of reports submitted under the new event types nearly doubled after implementation of the guidelines, which had included information on new and revised event types and subtypes to promote consistency in reporting.
3. Across the state, healthcare facilities enthusiastically embraced the education efforts for the standardization principles.
"The standardization project took several months with a multistakeholder workgroup to help develop a consensus on 28 guiding principles as well as make technical changes to the authority's reporting system to improve consistency in event reporting," said Rachel Levine, MD, chair of the Pennsylvania PSA. "It is a work in progress in terms of analyzing the reports, but early signs indicate the implementation is working."
To read the full report, click here.
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