Jaz-Michael King
May 25th, 2007, 01:11 PM
Pioneering Ideas Blog
Health Courts and Accountability for Patient Safety
previous post (http://rwjfblogs.typepad.com/pioneer/2007/05/avoidability_wo.html)
Mello and Studdert discuss the potential gains from sharing patient claims information.
As medicolegal researchers, we are acutely aware of the value of malpractice claims as a source of data on why medical errors occur and how they can be prevented. Unfortunately, in the U.S., claims data are extremely hard to get. There is no centralized repository of detailed information about the facts underlying claims. The information is held by hundreds of liability insurers—and held tightly. But when the data have been shared with researchers, big gains in patient safety research have been made.
One attractive feature of the health courts model is the potential for routing medical injury claims through a centralized body and gathering and storing detailed information about what happened. We envision that a division of the health court within the state government would be responsible for maintaining a database of claims information, conducting analyses (in cooperation with external researchers), and feeding the findings back to health care providers. We saw this happening in each of the foreign compensation systems we visited.
In New Zealand, for example, a patient safety division of the compensation scheme analyzes each claim and assigns it a safety assessment score based on both the seriousness of the injury and the frequency with which that kind of injury is represented among claims. High-scoring injuries are targeted for further research, with the goal being to identify common contributing factors which are then passed on to hospitals to help guide their injury prevention work. Representatives of the compensation scheme issue safety alerts and visit hospitals to make presentations about important safety issues. Individual hospitals can also request data on their claims in order to perform benchmarking against similar institutions.
In summary, foreign administrative compensations systems have recognized the value of their claims data as a tool for learning about patient safety improvement.
A health court in the U.S., too, could leverage claims information to learn about the circumstances that contribute to medical errors. And this information could be used by hospitals as well, as we will discuss next. (http://rwjfblogs.typepad.com/pioneer/2007/05/health_courts_a_1.html)
Full Article @ Pioneering Ideas... (http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/typepad/rwjfblogs/pioneer/~3/115670208/health_courts_a.html)
Health Courts and Accountability for Patient Safety
previous post (http://rwjfblogs.typepad.com/pioneer/2007/05/avoidability_wo.html)
Mello and Studdert discuss the potential gains from sharing patient claims information.
As medicolegal researchers, we are acutely aware of the value of malpractice claims as a source of data on why medical errors occur and how they can be prevented. Unfortunately, in the U.S., claims data are extremely hard to get. There is no centralized repository of detailed information about the facts underlying claims. The information is held by hundreds of liability insurers—and held tightly. But when the data have been shared with researchers, big gains in patient safety research have been made.
One attractive feature of the health courts model is the potential for routing medical injury claims through a centralized body and gathering and storing detailed information about what happened. We envision that a division of the health court within the state government would be responsible for maintaining a database of claims information, conducting analyses (in cooperation with external researchers), and feeding the findings back to health care providers. We saw this happening in each of the foreign compensation systems we visited.
In New Zealand, for example, a patient safety division of the compensation scheme analyzes each claim and assigns it a safety assessment score based on both the seriousness of the injury and the frequency with which that kind of injury is represented among claims. High-scoring injuries are targeted for further research, with the goal being to identify common contributing factors which are then passed on to hospitals to help guide their injury prevention work. Representatives of the compensation scheme issue safety alerts and visit hospitals to make presentations about important safety issues. Individual hospitals can also request data on their claims in order to perform benchmarking against similar institutions.
In summary, foreign administrative compensations systems have recognized the value of their claims data as a tool for learning about patient safety improvement.
A health court in the U.S., too, could leverage claims information to learn about the circumstances that contribute to medical errors. And this information could be used by hospitals as well, as we will discuss next. (http://rwjfblogs.typepad.com/pioneer/2007/05/health_courts_a_1.html)
Full Article @ Pioneering Ideas... (http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/typepad/rwjfblogs/pioneer/~3/115670208/health_courts_a.html)