Online Medical Incident Reporting

The Approach

MIRS start screen

More than 180,000 patient deaths and 1.3 million patient injuries occur annually as a consequence of healthcare delivery errors. An important first step in addressing these problems is to thoroughly document the situations that gave rise to them.

PSE worked with the medical staff at the intensive care unit of Navy Medical Center in San Diego to create a prototype online reporting system based on the critical incident technique.

The Solution

Sample MIRS screen

The Medical Incident Reporting System (MIRS) uses an online menu-driven, structured interview to collect detailed descriptions of healthcare delivery events.

Benefits

MIRS offers numerous advantages for healthcare reporting:

  • Time and cost effective data collection
  • Involves healthcare providers in quality control
  • Supplies data for assessing quality of care
  • Helps reduce healthcare costs
  • Improves treatment outcomes
  • Document error frequency/severity
  • Identify probable root causes of incidents
  • Monitor effectiveness of interventions to reduce errors
  • Meets IOM/JACHO requirements for incident reporting