Toward a human-centered voluntary medical incident reporting system.

Abstract

Voluntary medical incident reports are a valuable source for studying adverse events and near misses. Underreporting and low quality of reports in local organizations, however, have become the impediments in identifying trends and patterns relating at the local, regional and national level. Human factors on usefulness and ease of use have shown their important role in acceptance of voluntary reporting systems. To understand and identify the obstacles of quality reporting, we employed a set of human-centered analysis methods to examine one-year voluntary medical incident reports of a University Hospital. We found about 30% of the reports labeled as "miscellaneous" and "other", and their real incident types or error descriptions were identified through an in-depth recoding. Human-centered analyses show that the pre-defined reporting categories could serve well for the voluntary reporting need if reporters' tasks were better represented on user-friendly interfaces. We suggest that a human-centered, ontology based system design for voluntary reporting is feasible which could help improve completeness, accuracy, and interoperability among national and international standards.