According to research from Boston Children's Hospital, a new trigger tool that can retrospectively identify adverse events could help provide safer pediatric hospital care.
The Center of Excellence for Pediatric Quality Measurement at BCH developed the Global Assessment of Pediatric Patient Safety Trigger Tool. The tool flags triggers in medical records that indicate to medical professionals when an adverse event may have occurred.
The GAPPS trigger tool builds off existing trigger tools, literature review, consultations with trigger tool experts, input from a stakeholder panel and national field test results.
Researchers tested a draft of the trigger tool in 16 hospitals across the U.S. from June 2013 to February 2014 and reviewed 3,814 pediatric medical records. After the study, they finalized a list containing only triggers that identified adverse events in at least 10 percent of instances.
Research shows that the trigger tool has very high specificity, high reliability and higher sensitivity than other patient harm detection methods.
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