To our knowledge this is the first patient safety mobile app for the smartphone and tablet developed for use by physicians, nurses, and other hospital staff to communicate hospital/medical incident reports or quality assurance (QA) alerts, near misses, or other patient safety adverse events.
The WHO has called for an international effort to reduce patient safety errors and estimates that globally there are millions of patients each year harmed by unsafe medical care and perhaps 1 in 10 patients may be harmed in advanced hospital settings. In the United States, the 2010 report of the
Office of Inspector General (OIG) estimated that 1 in 7 Medicare patients experienced adverse events
related to hospital care. The report estimated that 44% of these events were clearly or likely preventable and hospital care costs related to these events were an estimated $324 million in 2008 alone..
This app is unique in that it has been developed by a physician who is in full time clinical and surgical practice and has over a decade of medical leadership experience involving review of medical and surgical QA alerts / incident reports at a major acute care hospital. It has been developed using an amalgamation of criteria and guidelines as suggested by the WHO, JCAHO, CMS, and AHRQ. The app advocates users to follow their own institution’s medical by-laws and criteria for peer review reporting to their respective patient safety administrator.
In an increasingly complex environment of health care, medical and hospital staff are required to navigate through many layers of administration, electronic records, and multiple passwords on computers or charts, just to report an adverse event or near miss. By enabling the user to use a smart phone or tablet to directly transmit incident reports, the QA alert app reduces barriers and thus may promote patient safety by increasing ease of reporting
The app has pre-populated QA administrator emails for the Maryland, Washington DC, and Northern Virginia major acute care hospitals within the United States. Users from other States in the U.S. or even from other countries can also send the QA alert/incident reports if they know their respective hospital QA administrator’s email and type it into the Incident Report Screen. The app provides educational content and references to learn more about patient safety. There is also a Literature Search option as an in-app purchase for those users who wish to learn more about specific key words related to their incident report.
Join the movement to help patient safety by downloading and using this free app.
We welcome and encourage your input. Please send comments and suggestions to us at support@patientsafeside.com