A new report released from the Office of the Inspector General looked at Medicare beneficiaries discharged in October 2008. Findings from the report show that an estimated 60 percent of adverse and temporary harm events nationally occurred at hospitals in States with reporting systems, yet only an estimated 12 percent of events nationally met State requirements for reporting. Researchers also found that hospitals reported only 1 percent of events. Most of the events that States required to be reported but that hospitals did not report were not identified by internal hospital incident reporting systems. This suggests that low reporting to State systems is more likely the result of hospital failure to identify events than of hospitals’ neglecting to report known events.
Read full report: http://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/oei-06-09-00092.pdf