Patient safety bill calls for voluntary error reporting

Medical mistakes that are reported to a "patient safety organization" would be protected from legal action.

By Amy Snow Landa, AMNews staff. July 1, 2002.

Washington -- In the latest effort to reduce medical errors in the nation's health care system, a "tripartisan" group of senators recently introduced legislation designed to encourage physicians and others to report mistakes voluntarily.

Under the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act, medical professionals would be able to report mistakes confidentially to private groups called "patient safety organizations." To qualify as a PSO, a group would have to certify its ability to collect and analyze patient safety information on a confidential basis, and use the data to provide feedback to health care organizations.

The National Patient Safety Foundation would "definitely" qualify as a PSO, according to a spokesman.

The information collected by the organizations would be granted certain legal protections that would prevent lawyers from obtaining it through discovery or subpoena, or admitting the data as evidence in any civil, criminal or administrative action.

Removing the fear of lawsuits is key to enticing more physicians and hospitals to come forward voluntarily with information about patient safety, said Sen. James Jeffords (I, Vt.), one of the bill's sponsors. "If you don't get the information, you can't address the problems."

Under the legislation, patient safety organizations would collect information on medical errors and near misses, analyze the data for trends, and recommend to hospitals and others ways to prevent future mistakes.

A judge could order a PSO to release patient safety information but only if it was deemed material to a certain case, its release was in the public interest, and it was not available from another source. [...]