Few Adverse Events in Hospitals Were Reported to State Adverse Event Reporting Systems.
This report built on earlier research to examine rates of adverse events reported to state-level reporting systems compared with hospital data. It found that, even in states with required hospital reporting of adverse events, only about one in nine events is reported to the state. Because few of the events were found in each hospital's incident reporting system, the investigators concluded that the low rate of reporting was likely due to hospital failure to identify events rather than hospitals failing to report known events.