WASHINGTON -- (AP) -- The Bush administration is working to create an Internet-based clearinghouse of medical mistakes that doctors and hospitals make, trying to help them avoid such errors.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson plans to announce today a task force of department officials to develop the system, officials said.

Healthcare providers could use the Internet to report information to the federal government, or state and private-sector regulators. At least 18 states require health officials to report mistakes, and the federal government routinely collects voluntary information from hospitals for research.

The rules on how to report errors vary widely, even among federal agencies. HHS officials say the logistics of recording and reporting errors can overwhelm doctors.

``It's like asking your travel agent to memorize the flight schedule,'' said Dr. John Eisenberg, who coordinates health quality issues for HHS.

Researchers estimate that mistakes in surgery, medication and other services kill an estimated 44,000 to 98,000 people each year. Recent reports have suggested that computerized records could help doctors and hospitals keep better track of the things that go wrong.

HHS officials intend to introduce their idea today in Reston, Va., at a two-day meeting of major medical groups, state health departments and medical software developers.

Addressing recent concerns about patient privacy, officials cautioned that no patient names or other personal information would be transmitted -- just records that hospitals and doctors send to the federal government or state and industry regulators.

For example, a standardized system would encourage hospitals to report when surgery is performed on a wrong limb or organ. Not all state or industry regulators require that now.

Some in Congress have suggested that they would not oppose a national information system.

The administration has said there is no move to mandate use of a medical error-reporting system.

``We can make much better use of information we already collect, and we can translate that . . . into quality gains for patients,'' Thompson said.

The system envisioned by HHS is not unheard of in other fields, Eisenberg said.

The airline industry, for one, reports errors to a common site and the information is used to alert pilots to the mistake so they will avoid doing the same thing.

President Bush is asking Congress for $12 million in start-up money for the medical error-reporting system.

http://www.miami.com/herald/content/news/national/digdocs/011614.htm

-- Anonymous, April 23, 2001

Answers

http://digitalmass.boston.com/news/daily/04/042301/medical_errors.html

U.S. aims to improve data on medical errors

By Will Dunham, Reuters, 04/23/2001

WASHINGTON - Aiming to prevent potentially deadly medical errors, the Bush administration today launched an effort to establish a confidential database on the Internet of mistakes made by doctors and hospitals.

The database would draw on information already being given to states or the federal government and would not be available to the general public to check up on blunders committed by any specific doctor or hospital, according to officials from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The project is intended to help government regulators and medical professionals spot trends in mistakes in an effort to avoid repeating them, while cutting through the red tape that hinders reporting on such errors, officials said.

The HHS agencies spearheading the effort are the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Health Care Financing Administration.

``What the public will gain from this system is improved health care because this is going to make available to (health care) providers at all levels information that's going to allow them to learn from errors and to enhance safety,'' Dr. Gregg Meyer, director of AHRQ's Center for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety, told Reuters.

Experts said in a 1999 report that medical errors kill between 44,000 and 98,000 people annually, with up to 7,000 of those deaths resulting from mistakes in prescribing or dispensing drugs.

HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson on Monday announced the formation of a task force to seek ways to improve the collection of data on patient safety. Thompson asked the task force to devise a user-friendly Internet-based patient safety reporting system that would enable faster cross-matching and electronic analysis of reports on medical errors.

Concern over a "data graveyard"

A number of states require health care providers to report on mistakes, while federal agencies collect such information provided on a voluntary basis. But whether this data is being put to good use is questionable.

Meyer said he was concerned that reports on medical mistakes currently may reside in a ``data graveyard.'' For example, he said experts examining dialysis centers were forced to sift by hand through reports to three government agencies that, once considered together, showed that certain cleaning techniques used on dialysis machines caused deadly infections.

``Someone had to sit down and hand match data that the government was already collecting,'' Meyer said. ``We think that just simply doesn't make sense, and is not a situation that can be carried forward.''

Thompson announced the initiative during a meeting of officials from medical professional organizations, state health departments, state licensure boards, accrediting bodies and patient advocacy groups.

``Working with our state and private-sector partners, we can make much better use of the information we already collect, and we can translate that information into quality gains for patients,'' Thompson said in a statement. ``At the same time, we will streamline the reporting burdens that providers face today, and we will make important findings more accessible, more quickly to the providers who need to know.''

Meyer said the initiative is not aimed at producing a database naming individual doctors involved in medical mistakes.

``In terms of having this be a data bank of provider-level error rates, that's not the direction that we're going,'' he said. ``The reason we're not going there is that what we have learned from research is that the way to approach patient safety is to take a systems-based approach to get away from that old system of name, blame and shame.''

Meyer said it may take a year or two to put in place the task force recommendations. Officials said the department's budget request for the next fiscal year seeks $72 million for efforts to improve patient safety and reduce errors.

-- Brooks (tabbies@R.us), April 23, 2001

-- Anonymous, April 23, 2001