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More Information on the Data Standards for Patient Safety Committee
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The Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, To Err is Human (2000), called for the establishment of patient safety reporting systems, including state-based reporting systems for accountability purposes that focus on serious adverse events (the so called "never events") and reporting systems for quality improvement purposes that focus on near misses and no-harm events. The IOM Committee also recommended that steps be taken to develop data standards to maximize the usefulness of information derived from the data collected, to minimize the reporting burden, and to allow for comparisons across reporting systems and over time.
In response to the IOM report, and to the report of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' (DHHS) Quality Interagency Coordination (QuIC) Task Force that followed, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's (AHRQ) FY2001 appropriation targeted $50 million to research on patient safety. Among the areas specifically targeted by the Senate Appropriations Committee in its report language was a call for the Agency to provide guidance that would facilitate state reporting efforts.
The AHRQ has made considerable progress in development of such guidance through two projects funded in FY2001. The first was an analysis of state-based patient safety reporting systems conducted by the National Academy for State Health Policy. The second is the ongoing work of the DHHS Patient Safety Task Force (consisting of AHRQ, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) to integrate data collection on medical errors and adverse events, coordinate research and analysis efforts, and promote collaboration on reducing the occurrence of injuries that result from medical errors. Both of these efforts have identified the need for further guidance on the standardization and coding of data submitted to patient safety reporting systems. The AHRQ has approached the IOM to establish a committee of experts to provide advice on how best to proceed on the development of patient safety data standards.
The purpose of this 24-month IOM project is to produce a detailed plan to facilitate the development of data standards applicable to the collection, coding and classification of patient safety information. The plan will apply to both adverse event data and errors data.
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Last Updated: 7/28/2003, 11:07 AM
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