Over the past several weeks, many of us at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and Food and Drug Administration have been evaluating the submissions for the Reporting Patient Safety Events Challenge. Team 90, consisting of KBCore (created by CRG Medical, Inc.) and iHealthExchange, was selected the winner of the challenge—and the recipient of the $50,000 prize—because the company’s patient safety reporting system best fit the criteria of the challenge to find and reduce the risks associated with patient care. Right now, finding risks through the reporting of adverse events is slow because paper-based systems may be hard to read and require transmission by fax machines. By modernizing the patient safety reporting system through the use of computer-based applications we can better shed light on medical errors and augment the discovery of new patient safety hazards more timely and efficiently.
Reporting Patient Safety Events Challenge Submissions
The Challenge submissions were evaluated on a variety of criteria to determine which would potentially improve reporting of adverse events the most. The applications were required to make it easier to file an adverse event report using AHRQ’s Common Formats while allowing for:
- The inclusion of additional information during the initial submission and from a follow-up investigation;
- Import of relevant electronic health record or personal health record information, including screenshots; and
- Ability to submit reports to various entities including PSOs, FDA, and other health oversight organizations.
IDinc and Shands Healthcare finished in second place, while third place went to MidasPlus. They will receive $15,000 and $5,000, respectively.
Last year I graduated from nursing school and began working in a specialized intensive care unit in a large academic hospital. During an orientation class a nurse who has worked on the unit for six years gave a presentation on the various kinds of strokes. Noting the difference between supratentorial and infratentorial strokes—the former being more survivable and the latter having a more severe effect on the body’s basic functions such as breathing—she said that if she were going to have a stroke, she knew which type she would prefer: “I would want to have an infratentorial stroke. Because I don’t even want to make it to the hospital.”
This November, voters weighed in on an array of 
Obama’s most significant healthcare-related accomplishment this year may well have been his campaign’s demonstration of the effective use of analytics and behavioral insight – strategies that also offer exceptional promise for the delivery of care and the maintenance of health.
