Patient Safety Events Challenge issued by ONC

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) is proud to launch the Reporting Patient Safety Events Challenge, designed to spur development of platform-agnostic health IT tools to facilitate the reporting of medical errors in hospital and outpatient settings. This developer contest is part of ONC’s Investing in Innovation (i2) Initiative, which holds competitions to accelerate development and adoption of technology solutions that enhance quality and outcomes.

Why launch this challenge? Hospitals struggle to increase internal incident reporting and to create effective systems for their quality and risk management staff to complete root cause analyses and follow-up. Additionally, quality and risk management staff cope with reporting fatigue in a paper-based reporting system, affecting reporting frequency and quality. Oftentimes, their limited energy is spent convincing physicians and nurses to report incidents, doing enough of an investigation to fill out the appropriate forms, and sending them to the appropriate agencies—all of which lead to better research and improvement efforts.

We’re [ONC] looking for passionate innovators to participate in this exciting new developer contest to help the health care delivery community solve these issues. These reporting issues would be partially alleviated through the deployment of an effective software reporting solution. The solution needs to make it easier for any qualified individual to file a report electronically, using Common Formats, but allowing for additional elements and narratives. It must allow the hospital quality and risk management staff to add information from follow-up investigations; submit reports as appropriate to patient safety organizations, the states, or the Food and Drug Administration; and track follow-up activities.