News and briefs: Few adverse events get reported to state systems

Only one percent of adverse and temporary harm events at hospitals get reported to state adverse action reporting systems, according to a study from the Office of Inspector General (OIG) published on July 19, 2012. It may not be that hospitals are trying to keep incidents from being reported to the state; the OIG found that most of the events states required to be reported were not flagged as such in hospital reporting systems.

States are not required to maintain incident reporting systems. When the study was conducted in 2008, 25 states and the District of Columbia had systems in place. The OIG looked at medical records of 780 Medicare beneficiaries who were hospitalized in October 2008 and found that about 13% of these patients experienced an adverse event and 13% experienced a temporary harm event. Sixty percent of these events happened in states with incident reporting systems, yet only 12% of the incidents met state requirements for reporting. Although the OIG makes no formal recommendation in the study, the study points to a disconnect between hospital and state incident reporting systems.