A new approach to tracking the harmfulness of medical errors in health care systems

A variety of approaches are available to monitor and quantify the frequency of medical errors and the harm associated with them. The University HealthSystem Consortium Patient Safety Net provides a categorical, rank-ordered approach for designating harm associated with medical errors but does not lend itself to routine monitoring of change over time. A brief questionnaire was developed and given to hospital administrators to collect ratings about the harmfulness of events occurring in each of the 10 University HealthSystem Consortium harm-score categories. Results revealed a high degree of agreement among raters for harmfulness ratings for each category. A cubic model fit the data best and provided weights for each of the harm-score categories. This preliminary study proposes a methodology for quantifying harm scores.