AHRQ Quality and Safety Review System (QSRS)
Mission
AHRQ has developed and tested an improved patient safety surveillance system to replace the Medicare Patient Safety Monitoring System (MPSMS). The new system is known as the Quality and Safety Review System (QSRS). The QSRS relies on clinical information recorded in medical records, and the system has been designed to make use of structured data where it is or may become available.
Visit the QSRS page.
Relevance
Based on the landmark Institute of Medicine report, To Err Is Human, safety experts—including AHRQ, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and other Federal partners—realized that hospitals needed to understand specifically how and where adverse events were occurring in order to prevent them. Therefore, CMS created the MPSMS to measure the magnitude of adverse events among hospital patients covered by Medicare and to create a baseline to assess the impact of national patient safety initiatives. The MPSMS was transferred to AHRQ in 2009.
Features
The QSRS:
- Offers an expanded array of adverse event measures.
- Captures an "all-cause harm" measurement that hospitals and clinicians can use to better target and measure quality improvement efforts.
- Provides additional detail for the most frequently occurring events.
- Uses standardized definitions and algorithms, consistent with those used by the AHRQ Common Formats for Event Reporting and other measures.
Users
The QSRS will meet the needs of a variety of users, including hospital providers served by Patient Safety Organizations (PSOs). The QSRS website is password protected, but additional users will be granted access over time.
Partners
AHRQ awarded contracts to Johns Hopkins University and the MedStar Health Research Institute to evaluate the QSRS during a pilot test in hospitals.
