Identifying and preventing drug-drug interactions (DDI) is critical to patient safety, but the usual method of detecting DDI and other errors - manual chart review - is resource intensive. This study describes the use of an e-trigger to pre-select charts for review that are more likely to include one of three DDIs, thus reducing the overall number of charts needing review. Two of the DDI e-triggers had high positive predictive values (0.76 and 0.57), demonstrating that e-triggers can be a useful method to pre-selecting charts for manual review.

Prediction models are increasingly used in healthcare to identify potential patient safety events. This systematic review including 25 articles identified several challenges related to electronic health record (EHR)-based prediction models for adverse drug event diagnosis or prognosis, including adherence to reporting standards, use of best practices to develop and validate prediction models, and absence of causal prediction modeling.

Organizational, environmental, and work-related factors can contribute to performance variations and human error during healthcare delivery. This study examined perioperative sentinel events reported to a Dutch database over a one-year period. It found that although performance variability continued in almost all events, it was rarely explicitly mentioned in incident reports or represented in resulting improvement measures. The authors suggest that explicitly addressing performance variability in sentinel event analyses can lead to more effective improvement measures that account for human performance in healthcare.

… validated, and based on objective features). … Bos K, van der Laan MJ, Dongelmans DA. Prioritising recommendations …

… BMJ Open Qual … To support the development of a national approach to systems learning from sentinel events … of similar SEs, the authors highlight the need for a transparent approach to assessing events and implementing …

Conceptually analogous to failure mode and effect analysis, the Bow-Tie method is used to prospectively detect safety hazards. In this study, the Bow-Tie method was used to identify latent safety hazards in intrahospital transport, risk factors for unintentional extubation, and contributors to poor interdisciplinary communication.

… the care they provided to patients in the hours preceding a cardiopulmonary arrest or unplanned transfer to the …