Measuring Patient Safety in Real Time: An Essential Method for Effectively Improving the Safety of Care

Summary

The continuing evidence of preventable deaths due to medical error has led to recent calls to improve measurement of safety in hospitals. Don Berwick et al., in a paper published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, argue that electronic health records (EHRs), which have been broadly adopted, offer the opportunity to measure all causes of harm in real time, and in the whole patient population — with minimal need for additional resources — allowing for robust measurement of patient safety and prompt intervention to reduce or mitigate harm.

Content

Author of the paper, Don Berwick, talks to the Institute for Healthcare about using the electronic health record to measure and improve patient safety in a short video which explains what the paper is about.

The paper is paywalled but the video is free to view.