Measuring Patient Safety: The Medicare Patient Safety Monitoring System (Past, Present, and Future).

The explicit declaration in the landmark 1999 Institute of Medicine report "To Err Is Human" that, in the United States, 44,000 to 98,000 patients die each year as a consequence of "medical errors" gave widespread validation to the magnitude of the patient safety problem and catalyzed a number of U.S. federal government programs to measure and improve the safety of the national healthcare system.

An overview of measurement activities in the partnership for patients.

The Partnership for Patients, launched in April 2011, is a national quality improvement initiative from the Department of Health and Human Services that has set ambitious goals for U.S. providers to improve patient safety and care transitions.

ICD-11 for quality and safety: overview of the WHO Quality and Safety Topic Advisory Group.

This paper outlines the approach that the WHO's Family of International Classifications (WHO-FIC) network is undertaking to create ICD-11. We also outline the more focused work of the Quality and Safety Topic Advisory Group, whose activities include the following: (i) cataloguing existing ICD-9 and ICD-10 quality and safety indicators; (ii) reviewing ICD morbidity coding rules for main condition, diagnosis timing, numbers of diagnosis fields and diagnosis clustering; (iii) substantial restructuring of the health-care related injury concepts coded in the ICD-10 chapters 19/20, (iv) mapping of ICD-11 quality and safety concepts to the information model of the WHO's International Classification for Patient Safety and the AHRQ Common Formats; (v) the review of vertical chapter content in all chapters of the ICD-11 beta version and (vi) downstream field testing of ICD-11 prior to its official 2015 release. The transition from ICD-10 to ICD-11 promises to produce an enhanced classification that will have better potential to capture important concepts relevant to measuring health system safety and quality-an important use case for the classification.

How event reporting by US hospitals has changed from 2005 to 2009.

Context: Information is needed on the performance of hospitals' adverse-event reporting systems and the effects of national patient-safety initiatives, including the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act (PSQIA) of 2005. Results are presented of a 2009 survey of a sample of non-federal US hospitals and changes between 2005 and 2009 are examined.

Methods: The Adverse Event Reporting System survey was fielded in 2005 and 2009 using a mixed-mode design with stratified random samples of non-federal US hospitals; risk managers were respondents.