Modern Healthcare reports on the release of statistics by states, including California, Utah and Indiana, from their adverse-events reporting systems. California announced another round of publicly disclosed fines related to errors. Indiana and Utah both released reports showing medical errors have increased in those states while California levied administrative penalties for adverse-event-related errors.
- The Indiana State Health Department released its second report through the state’s mandated adverse-events reporting system, announced errors increased 23.5% to 105 last year from 85 in 2006.
- The Utah Health Department reported 57 errors in the state during 2006, up 16.3% from 49 in 2006 (http://health.utah.gov/psi/publications.html).
- California said that 1,224 incidents were collected during the first year of mandatory reporting, but only some of those were deemed to be true adverse events.
Several states have been tracking adverse events through mandated reporting systems over the past few years, and others are considering adding similar systems. While most of the states conducting adverse-events reporting have systems that allow hospitals to report online, others such as California are using paper-based methods through which hospitals fill out forms and fax them into the health department. In addition most of the states provide the information collected on adverse events online via periodical reports. The California law governing events reporting requires the information to be available on a Web site by 2015.
