Surgeon-reported complications vs AHRQ Patient Safety Indicators: A comparison of two approaches to identifying adverse events (1 September 2018)

Summary

Traditionally, clinicians present complications at surgical morbidity and mortality (M&M) conferences, and the AHRQ Patient Safety Indicators (PSIs) use inpatient administrative data to identify certain adverse outcomes. Although both methods are used to identify adverse events and inform quality improvement efforts, these two methods might not overlap.

This is a retrospective observational study from Anderson et al. of all hospitalisations at a single academic department of surgery (including subspecialties) in 2016 involving a PSI-defined event identified by surgery faculty and residents for review by departmental M&M conference or administrative data. The authors analysed the degree to which these two processes captured PSI-defined events and reasons for exclusion by each process.

The study found that surgical M&M and the PSIs are complementary approaches to identifying complications. Both case-finding processes should be used to inform quality improvement efforts.