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Analysis of closed malpractice claims can be used to identify potential safety hazards in a variety of clinical settings. This analysis of closed emergency department malpractice claims indicates that diagnostic errors dominate, and clinical judgment and documentation categories continue to be associated with a higher likelihood of payout. Subcategories and contributing factors are also discussed.

Transitions of care represent a vulnerable time for patients. This survey found that safety in mental healthcare transitions (hospital to community) is perceived differently by patients, families, and healthcare professionals. While clinical indicators (e.g., suicide, self-harm, and risk of adverse drug events) are important, patients and families also highlighted the social elements of transitional safety (e.g., loneliness, emotional readiness for change).

Patient safety is a concern throughout the entire process of care from admission to discharge. This article highlights the role of risk managers to assure that patients return to a home environment that can enable their safe recovery whether the discharge is advised or not. 

California's Medicaid pay-for-performance program requires safety-net health care systems to report and improve upon diverse ambulatory safety measures. Researchers found that participating safety-net hospitals struggled to report accurate data. Systems had more success improving metrics that placed patients at risk of life-threatening harm when compared to metrics that required longer term follow-up or patient engagement.

Multiple factors in the hospital environment influence the incidence of missed nursing care. This commentary describes strategies to address these errors of omission, including changing mental models to recognize the financial benefit of increasing staffing levels to improve patient safety.

Patients are at risk for adverse events after they transition from hospital to home. This study used review of malpractice claims and stakeholder focus groups to inform planning tools for postdischarge care transitions. Pilot testing of the tools demonstrated acceptability and feasibility for patients and providers. These results suggest that malpractice data can inform safety improvement approaches.

This article provides an overview of patient safety issues in audiology such as diagnostic error and incomplete documentation. The author reviews steps individual clinicians can take to respond to errors and malpractice claims.

In response to a recent investigation raising concerns about inaccurate reporting of wait-time data, this commentary relates barriers to improving patient safety, such as overuse of performance measures. The authors describe approaches to augment safety, such as narrowing down performance measures to address the most significant concerns and engaging private health care organizations in improvement projects.

This analysis of closed malpractice claims over an 18-year period identified more than 300 cases of malpractice attributable to failure to communicate test results in a timely fashion. The incidence of such errors appeared to increase over the time period studied.

The review reveals shortcomings associated with do-not-resuscitate orders and suggests strategies to improve communication and hospital culture.

The systems approach to analyzing adverse events emphasizes how active errors (those made by individuals) and latent errors (underlying system flaws) contribute to preventable harm. Adverse events in ambulatory care may arise from an especially complex array of latent errors. This paper explores the role of time management problems, which the authors term "tempos," as a contributor to errors in ambulatory care. Through a review of closed malpractice claims, the authors identify 5 tempos that can affect the risk of an adverse event: disease tempo (the expected disease course), patient tempo (timing of complaints and adherence to recommendations), office tempo (including the availability of clinicians and test results), system tempo (such as access to specialists or emergency services), and access to knowledge. The role of these tempos in precipitating diagnostic errors and communication errors is discussed through analysis of the patterns of errors in malpractice claims. A preventable adverse event caused by misunderstanding of disease tempo is discussed in this AHRQ WebM&M commentary.