Grant: Operating Grant

Adverse events (AE) are poor outcomes caused by medical care. Adverse events are a major concern regarding improving the safety of the health care system as they effect up to 10% of hospitalized patients. To define solutions to prevent adverse events we must first detect them. We have designed and pilot tested a sensitive detection system termed prospective AE surveillance. This study is designed to determine the technical feasibility and generalizability of this model. This study will take place in several large Canadian hospitals including two large teaching hospitals. The study will evaluate the system from several perspectives including its technical performance, usability of the software, barriers to implementation, and usefulness of the information. A comprehensive set of methods will be used to obtain objectives including quantitative analyses and qualitative assessments. This work will help establish whether adverse events surveillance methodologies can be reproduced in multiple settings. This is an important step to the further development of adverse event detection systems, which are required to improve patient safety.