Description and outcomes of the DoctorQuality incident reporting system used at Baylor Medical Center at Grapevine

Traci Atherton, BSN

From the Office of Administration, Baylor Medical Center at Grapevine, Grapevine, Texas.

Portions of this article were modified with permission from the Journal of Healthcare Information Management: Joshi MS, Anderson JF, Marwaha S. A systems approach to improving error reporting. J Healthc Inf Manag 2002;16:40–45.

Corresponding author: Traci Atherton, Vice President of Clinical Support, Baylor Medical Center at Grapevine, 1650 West College, Grapevine, Texas 76051.

Problem: To improve error reporting so as to increase patient safety in a health care environment in which many barriers to reporting exist.

Setting: Baylor Medical Center at Grapevine, a 104-bed hospital in Northeast Tarrant County that is part of the Baylor Health Care System.

Strategies for improvement: Partnering with DoctorQuality to provide a consolidated, Web-based form for error reporting, online education, and a risk analyzer, complemented by efforts toward cultural change including staff training, encouragement of feedback, and the use of financial and nonfinancial incentives to report errors.

Effects of change: After implementing the system, the number of events reported increased 250% to 500%; costs for data collection, analysis, and management decreased by $25,000 to $35,000 annually; and the time required to track errors and make improvements was reduced 25% to 50%. Further, managers and staff were very satisfied with the system, ranking it >4 on a 5-point scale.

Conclusion. The institution's partnership with DoctorQuality to create a single Web-based form for error reporting was successful in improving efficiency and ease of access in reporting. Further, the institution was successful in creating a new organizational culture around errors. The success was due in part to strong leadership, collaboration of multidisciplinary staff, the ease of use of the system itself, and the effective educational, motivational, and communication mechanisms used. (BUMC Proceedings 2002;15:203-208)