Two decades of research have demonstrated the feasibility and promise of collecting information from health care professionals about adverse events, errors, and unsafe conditions in health care settings (such as hospitals and physician practices). This information can be used to understand the extent and nature of real and potential harms and to develop interventions that improve patient safety. Recently, investigators have begun to develop and evaluate systematic approaches to gathering information from patients and their caregivers about safety issues in a form that health care organizations can use as they seek to improve patient safety. This research on consumer reporting of patient safety information has highlighted a number of challenges.
Under contract to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and with its input, a research team led by RAND Corporation investigators undertook a project to design, pilot, and evaluate a prototype for collecting narrative and structured data about concerns that patients have about the safety of their health care, including errors and adverse events. The Health Care Safety Hotline was designed to allow consumers (patients, family members, friends, and other caregivers) to report patient safety problems (anonymously, if they choose) on a secure Web site or by calling a toll-free phone number. The prototype was also designed to enable the hotline to provide data (with the consumer’s permission) back to the health care organization.
This report describes the development and testing of the hotline prototype, its implementation and use in two health care delivery organizations within one pilot community, and its evaluation. The evaluation is based on the totality of the design and implementation experience, the feedback of a technical expert panel, and descriptive data on patient and caregiver reports collected and analyzed over a field period of 17 months (February 2014 through June 2015).
The report should be of interest to policymakers, leaders of health care systems and their related organizations, patient safety leaders, health services researchers, and others who are interested in the development and deployment of patient safety reporting systems.
