TY  - JOUR
T1  - DEvelopment of an online morbidity, mortality, and near-miss reporting system to identify patterns of adverse events in surgical patients
AU  - Bilimoria KY, Kmiecik TE, DaRosa DA, et al
Y1  - 2009/04/01
N1  - 10.1001/archsurg.2009.5
JO  - Archives of Surgery
SP  - 305
EP  - 311
VL  - 144
IS  - 4
N2  - Objectives 
    To design a Web-based system to track adverse and near-miss events, to establish an automated method to identify patterns of events, and to assess the adverse event reporting behavior of physicians.Design 
    A Web-based system was designed to collect physician-reported adverse events including weekly Morbidity and Mortality (M&M) entries and anonymous adverse/near-miss events. An automated system was set up to help identify event patterns. Adverse event frequency was compared with hospital databases to assess reporting completeness.Setting 
    A metropolitan tertiary care center.Main Outcome Measures 
    Identification of adverse event patterns and completeness of reporting.Results 
    From September 2005 to August 2007, 15 524 surgical patients were reported including 957 (6.2%) adverse events and 34 (0.2%) anonymous reports. The automated pattern recognition system helped identify 4 event patterns from M&M reports and 3 patterns from anonymous/near-miss reporting. After multidisciplinary meetings and expert reviews, the patterns were addressed with educational initiatives, correction of systems issues, and/or intensive quality monitoring. Only 25% of complications and 42% of inpatient deaths were reported. A total of 75.2% of adverse events resulting in permanent disability or death were attributed to the nature of the disease. Interventions to improve reporting were largely unsuccessful.Conclusions 
    We have developed a user-friendly Web-based system to track complications and identify patterns of adverse events. Underreporting of adverse events and attributing the complication to the nature of the disease represent a problem in reporting culture among surgeons at our institution. Similar systems should be used by surgery departments, particularly those affiliated with teaching hospitals, to identify quality improvement opportunities.
SN  - 0004-0010
M3  - doi: 10.1001/archsurg.2009.5
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/archsurg.2009.5
ER  -