Patient Safety Monitoring in Acute Care in a Decentralized National Health Care System: Conceptual Framework and Initial Set of Actionable Indicators.

Objectives: Monitoring patient safety is critical for continuous quality improvement in acute care. We carried out a national project to identify a conceptual framework with core indicators that could be uniformly applied in the decentralized health system of Italy.

Methods: We used key international references to identify a framework with a core list of indicators and data sources for calculation in 4 hospitals in the Lombardy region.