Patient Safety Measurement

Patient safety is the field of study and practice that aims to prevent harm or injury to patients while they receive medical care. Measuring patient safety and quality of care to promote improvement in care delivery is an ongoing national priority. Despite the growing interest in patient safety, recent studies indicate that preventable harm resulting from medical care remains high. Currently, our ability to measure adverse events (AEs) in a reliable, effective, and timely way remains limited. This is because many facilities still rely on voluntary reporting, manual chart review, or post-discharge coding to capture AEs. This results in both misclassification of and incomplete capture of some AEs, making it difficult to identify patient safety events or monitor improvements. However, recent advancements in safety measurement and reporting have led to the development of less time- and labor-intensive measures where errors can be detected and reported from electronic health records (EHRs) automatically. This has increased the reliability of detection and may serve as a more effective tool to monitor patient safety and guide interventions. As the science of patient safety measurement evolves, methods should continue to be improved, with the goal of measuring harm consistently and reliably, to standardize improvement efforts to optimize patient safety, care delivery, and cost savings.