Physician Reporting Compared with Medical-Record Review to Identify Adverse Medical Events

This study compared physician reporting of adverse events by the housestaff on the medical service of a teaching hospital with a retrospective two-step screening of the medical record for adverse events followed by implicit physician judgment about identified events and compared the combined strategies with the quality-of-care data routinely collected by the hospital.

Abstract

An adverse event identification strategy based on physician self-referral uncovers as many adverse events as does a record review and is less costly. In addition, physician-identified events are more likely to be preventable and, thus, are targets for quality improvement.