Hypoglycemia is a common and severe adverse drug event among patients with diabetes. This retrospective study of claims data found that Medicare patients with diabetes were less likely to be hospitalized or seen in the emergency department for hypoglycemia if their medications were prescribed electronically, compared to those receiving fewer or no electronic prescriptions. These findings add to the literature demonstrating the benefits of electronic prescribing.

Electronic health records have both safety benefits and unintended consequences. This analysis used data from the 2010–2013 Medicare Patient Safety Monitoring System to compare the incidence of in-hospital adverse events among hospitals that did and did not meet meaningful use requirements for health information technology (IT), according to the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society Analytics Database. Investigators found that hospitals that met meaningful use criteria also reported fewer adverse events. Although the study design does not establish a causal relationship between implementation of health IT and the decline in adverse events, the authors argue that these advances in health IT contributed to this patient safety improvement.

This analysis of Medicare data found that outpatient practices using electronic prescribing had fewer adverse drug events among their panel of patients with diabetes compared to practices not consistently using electronic prescribing. Although promising, this study does not address the many differences between practices that use electronic prescribing versus those that do not and the patients that select these disparate health care systems.

Although this study found that electronic medical records (EMRs) had no upfront impact on preventing hospital-acquired conditions, EMRs were associated with better coordination and recovery following patient safety events, which resulted in decreased patient deaths, readmissions, and costs.

… preventable readmissions are discussed in this AHRQ WebM&M commentary . …

The financial costs associated with medical errors have gained increasing attention, due to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services policy of nonpayment for certain preventable adverse events. This study sought to estimate costs associated with adverse events (measured by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's Patient Safety Indicators) in surgical patients. Importantly, by measuring costs for a 90-day period after surgery, the authors were able to estimate the postdischarge financial impact of adverse events. Up to 20% of costs were incurred after hospital discharge, and the investigators found significant impact of adverse events on mortality and hospital readmissions. The implications of this study and prior research in this area help formulate a business case for safety.

This AHRQ–funded study examined the relationship between hospital profit margins and the rate of patient safety events. Using data from 176 acute care hospitals in Florida, investigators categorized hospitals into four tiers based on their reported profit margins and compared event rates from more than one million surgical hospitalizations. Findings illustrated an inverse relationship, with the highest event rate occurring in hospitals with the lowest margins. The authors suggest that growing financial constraints may limit a hospital’s investment in patient safety, leading to greater numbers of adverse events.