Medical error reporting system still a year off

Several agencies must review the rules that will govern the patient safety organizations to which physicians will report.

By Dave Hansen, AMNews staff. Aug. 20, 2007.

Washington -- A national voluntary system for reporting medical errors is at least a year away from reality, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

President Bush signed the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act in July 2005. The system should be up and running by the middle of 2008, said William Munier, MD, acting director of AHRQ's Center for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety.

The agency recently moved one step closer to launch by soliciting companies to scrub the data so that patients and physicians cannot be identified. AHRQ also solicited a separate organization to study the information doctors and others report.

AHRQ put out a request for proposals in May for the two entities. The application period ended on July 9. Dr. Munier declined to state how many applications the agency received but said he was pleased by the response.

The next step is proposing regulations to govern the operation of patient safety organizations, said Dr. Munier. These are the entities to which physicians and other health professionals will be able to confidentially report errors and close calls. The PSOs will look for trends and feed patient safety data back to the health care community.