Patient safety event taxonomy standard endorsed

AORN Journal, Dec, 2005

The National Quality Forum (NQF) has endorsed a National Voluntary Consensus Standard for a patient safety taxonomy, according to an Aug 3, 2005, news release from the NQF. The voluntary consensus standard represents the consensus of more than 260 health care providers, consumer groups, professional associations, purchasers, federal agencies, and research and quality improvement organizations. This standard establishes the nation's first standardized, integrative classification system (ie, taxonomy) for health care errors and other patient safety problems.

Many healthcare providers, professional organizations, some states, and some agencies of the federal government have implemented patient safety reporting systems to identify, catalog, and analyze errors and other patient safety concerns. The ability to learn from these systems is limited, however, because the systems do not share information with each other. The NQF project addresses this by endorsing the Patient Safety Event Taxonomy, a specific classification system that will enable interoperability of reporting systems and comparability of information across systems and over time. The NQF further has endorsed definitions of key patient terms, standard reporting elements for patient safety reporting systems, and additional recommendations for guiding principles to improve the taxonomy and the role of the taxonomy in health care information technology infrastructure.

The taxonomy can be used to classify data collected through the various reporting systems used by different healthcare providers, allowing information about patient safety events to be organized, combined, and analyzed. Existing reporting systems should be mapped to this taxonomy and can evolve to align with it rather than be replaced by it.

National Quality Forum Endorses Voluntary Consensus Standard For Standardizing a Patient Safety Taxonomy (news release, Washington, DC: National Quality Forum, Aug 3, 2005).