The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality is developing a new online patient safety tool to track adverse events in hospitals.
The Quality and Safety Review System will track adverse events by capturing data from Medicare patients' EHRs. The system will also offer an expanded array of adverse event measures, including measures related to opioid use/misuse, surgical site infections and obstetric and neonatal adverse events.
Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and MedStar Health Research Institute in Hyattsville, Md., will test the system as a replacement for the current Medicare Patient Safety Monitoring System. The current system relies on outdated software, can't identify rare or unusual events and fails to measure adverse events not currently defined by one of its 21 measures, according to a recent article in the Journal of Patient Safety. Additionally, AHRQ designed the new Quality and Safety Review System to allow voluntary use at individual hospitals and systems, unlike the current system.