Can a System for Mining Medical Record Data Be the Key to Making Hospital Care Safer?

WASHINGTON, DC--(Marketwired - November 08, 2016) - MedStar Health has been selected by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to assess the accuracy, efficiency and usability of its patient safety surveillance system, Quality and Safety Review System (QSRS), to detect adverse events in medical records, during its pilot phase in hospitals.

"QSRS has tremendous potential, and this research takes it a step further by facilitating validation and optimization of the system, so that its data can be used to understand adverse events in hospitalized patients, and subsequently to prevent future occurrences," says Kathryn (Kate) Kellogg, MD, MPH, a principle investigator of the task order.

QSRS is being developed by AHRQ to replace the legacy Medicare Patient Safety Monitoring System (MPSMS). While the MPSMS has advanced the science of patient safety measurement, the current system's usefulness has approached its limits. The QSRS relies on clinical information recorded in medical records and applies standard definitions and algorithms to more easily identify events, generate adverse event rates, and trend performance over time. These features provide AHRQ and other users of the system the ability to measure all causes of harm and ensure that events can be accurately identified. In addition, testing of QSRS in hospitals will establish an opportunity to evaluate the system in ways not available with the current MPSMS system, by enabling wider use and a process for users to make recommendations for system improvements.

"This pilot test is a critical step toward achieving a standard surveillance system that could be implemented in any hospital," says Raj Ratwani, PhD, also a principle investigator of the task order.

The research and execution for this task order will be conducted by Drs. Kellogg and Ratwani with support from associates at the MedStar Health Research Institute, the MedStar Institute for Innovation, and the MedStar Institute for Quality and Safety.

MedStar is nationally recognized as having research experts in the MedStar Health Research Institute, the National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare, the MedStar Institute for Innovation, and the MedStar Institute for Quality and Safety. The Research Institute continues to be among the top 20 percent of U.S. institutions receiving funds from the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies.