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New Agency Site Focuses on Preventing Medical
Errors, Patient Safety
April 20, 2005 Most research shows senior
citizens are the most likely to suffer from medical errors and other
patient safety issues. There is now a Website created by the Agency for
Healthcare Research and Quality that claims to be a national one stop
portal of resources for preventing medical errors and improving safety.
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The site, AHRQ's Patient Safety Network, or PSNet,
can be found at
http://psnet.ahrq.gov. PSNet is the first comprehensive effort to
help health care providers, administrators, and consumers learn about
all aspects of patient safety, says AHRQs news release.
The site provides a wide variety of information on
patient safety resources, tools, conferences, and more. PSNet users can
customize the site around their unique interests and needs by creating a
"My PSNet" page. For instance, a pharmacist interested in how bar coding
can help prevent medication errors will be able to set up the site to
automatically collect the latest articles, news, and conferences on this
topic. Similarly, anesthesiologists and other physicians, nurses,
hospital administrators, and others can customize and search the site to
best meet their needs.
In addition, weekly PSNet updates are available to
subscribers on patient safety findings, literature, tools, and
conferences, as well as a carefully annotated collection of sentinel
patient safety journal articles in a "Classics" section. The site was
developed by the same team of researchers at the University of
California, San Francisco, that developed AHRQ's popular
WebM&M online patient safety journal, which will now be accessible
on PSNet.
"AHRQ PSNet provides a one-stop portal for patient
safety resources to help health care professionals improve health care
for all Americans," says AHRQ Director Carolyn M. Clancy, M.D. "Since
health care improvement begins at the local and individual level, users
can customize their own PSNet page, which will help them make better
health care decisions."
Robert Wachter, M.D., Associate Chairman of UCSF's Department of
Medicine and Chief of the Medical Service at UCSF Medical Center, leads
the project team that developed the site.
"Until about 5 years ago, there was remarkably
little evidence to inform decisions about patient safety, despite the
incredibly high stakes, says Wachter. Now, in large part due to AHRQ-supported
efforts, the challenge has shifted from making decisions with an
insufficient amount of information, to managing a growing but
unorganized treasure trove of data and tools. AHRQ PSNet promises to be
the leading Web site to help patients, policymakers, and researchers
meet this unique need."
PSNet is the latest patient safety improvement
endeavor by AHRQ, which leads the federal government's effort to improve
patient safety and reduce medical errors. AHRQ's mission is to improve
the quality, safety, efficiency, and effectiveness of health care for
all Americans.
The WebM&M site maintained by AHRQ for medical
professionals, includes private registration and allows the confidential
sharing of information about medical errors.
Our vision was that AHRQ WebM&M would help bridge
the gap between reporting and educationa gap that most other reporting
systems have not managed to close, Wachter said. By creating a
confidential, easy-to-use reporting system, the Web site allowed
clinicians from around the country (and the world) to safely submit
reports of errors. Armed with such cases, our role as editors was simply
to choose the most illustrative among them and then enlist the nations
(and often, the worlds) top experts in safety to comment on them in a
thoughtful, evidence-based, and engaging manner.
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