The attributes of medical event reporting systems.

This article describes an effort to design, develop, and implement a medical event reporting system for transfusion medicine-related incidents and errors. Using a combination of methods, a working prototype went into use with seven distinct components, including detection, selection, description, classification, interpretation, and local evaluation. The authors conclude that developing event-reporting systems can help organizations address systems issues, while input from end users drives both the model and the necessary improvements.