Validity of 16 AHRQ Patient Safety Indicators to identify in-hospital complications: a medical record review across nine Swiss hospitals (9 November 2023)

Summary

The Patient Safety Indicators (PSIs) are a set of quality indicators developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) providing information on potential hospital complications and adverse events after surgeries, procedures, and childbirth. They have been used for the past two decades in the USA for monitoring potentially preventable patient safety events in the inpatient setting through the automated screening of readily available administrative data.

However, these indicators are also used for hospital benchmarking and cross-country comparisons in other nations with different health-care settings and coding systems as well as missing present on admission (POA) flags in the administrative data. This study sought to comprehensively assess and compare the validity of 16 PSIs in Switzerland, where they have not been previously applied.