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Integrating Incident Reporting into an Electronic Patient Record System

^a Department of Anesthesia & Perioperative Medicine Alfred Hospital, Melbourne, Australia
^b Department of Epidemiology & Preventive Medicine, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
^c Health Services Management and Research Unit, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
^d NHMRC Centre for Clinical Research Excellence, Canberra, Australia
^e Department of Anesthesia & Intensive Care/Quality of Care Unit, Geneva University Hospital, Geneva, Switzerland.

^_* Correspondence and reprints: Guy Haller, MD, Department of Anesthesia & Intensive Care, Quality of Care Unit, Geneva University Hospital, 24, rue Micheli-du-Crest, 1211 Genève 14-Switzerland. (Email: Guy.Haller{at}hcuge.ch).

Received for publication: 07/06/06; accepted for publication: 12/12/06.

Developments in information technology offer new opportunities to design electronic patient record systems (EPR) which integrate a broad range of functions such as clinical decision support, order entry, or electronic alerts. It has been recently suggested that EPR could support new applications for disease surveillance and patient safety. We describe the integration of a voluntary incident reporting system into an EPR used in operating theatres, to allow the reporting of accidents and preventable complications. We assessed system’s reliability and users’ acceptance. During the 4-years observation period (2002-2006), 48,983 interventional procedures were performed. Clinicians documented 85.1% of procedures on the incident reporting form. Agreement between chart review and electronically reported incidents was 80.6%. The integration of an incident reporting system into an EPR is reliable and well supported by health care professionals.

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