WHO: Minimal Information Model user guide (14 September 2018)

Summary

One of the major challenges of patient safety incident reporting and learning systems lies in the difficulties of extracting practical information from the vast amount of data collected. Furthermore, many countries have not started collecting incident reports in patient safety at national level which makes it difficult to identify avoidable patient safety incidents and take action on them nationally.

Minimal Information Model for Patient Safety (MIM PS) has been developed to provide a simple tool to start collecting data on patient safety incidents to assist in data analysis and extract the minimal, but necessary information to learn from incidents in order to avoid recurrence of same types of incidents in the future. Also, the MIM PS can be used as mapping source from any types of existing reporting systems of patient safety incidents which means no need to develop the new reporting systems based on MIM PS.

This MIM user guide aims to explain each MIM category and how to implement MIM. It went through a validation process with EU and EFTA countries in 2014-2015. The MIM PS validation was supported by European Union in which EFTA countries also participated in the pilot testing.