Creating a Statewide Patient Safety Organization

Mary Reich CooperTracking Safety TrendsThe new statewide implementation of Medical Event Reporting System (MERS) software from GE Healthcare will make it easier to track trends, understand root causes and implement changes, Cooper said. A statewide system will allow hospitals to learn from each other’s near misses and process improvements, she added.Eventually all 16 hospitals in Rhode Island will report data through the MERS to a national network of patient safety databases, which will lead to the creation of an annual federal report about patient safety occurrences.Cooper said MERS “improves the transparency of medical event reporting and speeds routing of events to stakeholders.” It improves documentation of the communications related to an event and the improvements implemented, she added. Staff members can enter events quickly into the Web-based database using standard forms, and managers and administrators can sort, analyze and track actual and near-miss events.Complexity Around State PSOsCreating a statewide PSO is much more complicated than tracking patient safety within one organization, according to Jean Marie Rocha, MPH, RN, vice president for clinical affairs for the Hospital Association of Rhode Island. “The previous state reporting system had no common definitions,” she said. In five working sessions from March to July 2010, hospital officials met to standardize more than 100 definitions for categories such as events and near misses, pharmacy services and medication safety and employee events.The MERS rollout started in mid-2010, and all Rhode Island hospitals are expected to have implemented the system in early 2011.“The early feedback from hospital staffers is that MERS is the best thing since sliced bread,” Rocha added, because the reporting is mapped to the organizational structure so reports get routed automatically to managers and administrators.States such as Rhode Island and Delaware have made early progress in health IT because their size allows stakeholders to work closely together on governance issues. But Cooper said other states would benefit from starting to work on state-level PSOs as well.