Toolkit for Identifying Adverse Events Through Medical Record Review

OIG has found that patient harm is common among Medicare beneficiaries in a range of inpatient health care settings. Federal regulations require that hospitals and other health care facilities identify harm, such as adverse events, and work to reduce these events. We will use guidance materials and tools created for our prior studies of adverse events to develop a web-based toolkit for identifying and measuring adverse events to assist health care facilities, government agencies, and researchers in their efforts to improve care. We will share the resources that we developed and used in our adverse event studies to aid hospitals and other researchers in their own efforts to identify and monitor the incidence of adverse events. The toolkit will provide standard definitions for most event types, lists of triggers to flag patient harm, suggested guidance for reviewers, and considerations for clinical decision making.

Announced or Revised	Agency	Title	Component	Report Number(s)	Expected Issue Date (FY)
October 2021	CMS, AHRQ	Toolkit for Identifying Adverse Events Through Medical Record Review	Office of Evaluation and Inspections	OEI-06-21-00030	2022