Hospitals' patient safety progress too slow: report

Healthcare Financial Management, Feb, 2006

Despite the Institute of Medicine's sobering reports in 1999 and 2001 on the lack of patient safety systems in U.S. health care, hospitals are still "not close to meeting IOM recommendations," according to a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Dec. 14, 2005).

Researchers surveyed 107 hospitals in Utah and Missouri; both states had collaborated on a patient safety project funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The study was designed to evaluate the status of the hospitals' patient safety systems since the publication of the IOM reports, To Err Is Human and Crossing the Quality Chasm.

Using a 91-question survey, the hospitals ranked their adoption of various patient safety systems focused on seven variables: computerized physician order entry systems, computerized test results, and assessments of adverse events; specific patient safety policies; use of data in patient safety programs; drug storage, administration, and safety procedures; manner of handling adverse event/error reporting; prevention policies; and root cause analysis. For each hospital, the seven variables were totaled together to give an overall measure of the patient safety status of the hospital.

According to the report, 74 percent of hospitals reported full implementation of a written patient safety plan--and nearly 9 percent reported no plan. The greatest level of patient safety systems seems to be in the area of surgery. Despite the fact that the area of medications showed improvements, only 34.1 percent of survey respondents reported full implementation of computerized provider order entry systems for medications.

The report concludes, "Patient safety system progress is slow and is a cause for great concern. Efforts for improvement must be accelerated."