Hospital Identification of Patient Harm Events

Hospitals collect information about patient harm events to meet Medicare requirements to measure, analyze, and track adverse patient harm events. Incident reporting systems enable providers and hospital staff to report information about patient safety incidents when they occur. In addition to general incident reporting systems, hospitals use other surveillance systems to capture events within specific hospital departments, such as the hospital pharmacy, or to capture specific types of adverse events, such as infections. Hospitals analyze this information to identify trends and root causes of safety issues to improve care and prevent recurrences of harm events. We will determine the extent to which hospitals identify patient harm events and report those events to external entities. We will use harm events OIG identified through medical review for the study Adverse Events in Hospitals: A Quarter of Medicare Patients Experienced Harm in October 2018 (OEI-06-18-00400) as the basis for this review.

Announced or Revised	Agency	Title	Component	Report Number(s)	Expected Issue Date (FY)
May 2023	CMS, AHRQ	Hospital Identification of Patient Harm Events	Office of Evaluation and Inspections	OEI-06-18-00401	2025