HARRISBURG Group to scrutinize medical errors

The state-level authority is believed to be the first of its kind in the country.
HARRISBURG (AP) -- The state's new Patient Safety Authority is expected to begin receiving information next month on medical mistakes or near-mistakes and analyzing the information to try to prevent a recurrence.
The duty of reporting is up to the health-care institutions, although the authority has procedures in place to receive anonymous reports from whistle-blowers, such as individual health-care workers, and requires hospitals to have internal patient safety committees.
While many hospitals in the state already had patient safety committees designed to correct the source of mistakes, officials say this kind of state-level authority appears to be the first of its kind in the country.
Hospitals currently report serious medical mistakes to the Department of Health, which then ensures that corrective action is taken.
The authority was included in a package of reforms in March 2002 designed to lower medical malpractice insurance premiums paid by doctors and hospitals.
Here's the purpose
Officials hope it will eventually help identify and correct practices that lead to medical mistakes, and hence costly lawsuits that doctors say have dramatically driven up their premiums in the past three years.
"This was not intended as a quick fix," said the authority chairman, Dr. Robert Muscalus, Pennsylvania's physician general.
"For those who think that our existence will result in the reduction of premiums in the next six months, that's not going to happen. It's going to take some time."
Lawyers counter that premiums are rising to compensate for the quickly rising cost of health care that must be paid out for medical malpractice victims.
In addition, lawyers charge that insurers are jacking up premiums to compensate for recent investment losses and unusually low premiums in the 1990s when competition was stiff.
Success for the Patient Safety Authority will involve gathering information, identifying patterns, and proposing solutions, which hospitals must then use to improve themselves, Muscalus said.
A pilot group of institutions will begin reporting to the authority Sept. 29 to smooth out kinks in the program. Officials hope the other 350 hospitals, outpatient surgery centers, and birthing centers will begin reporting in early 2004.
Muscalus said that he expects one challenge for the institutions will be defining what is a near-mistake -- an occurrence that could have caused an unanticipated patient injury, but did not -- as opposed to something that doesn't need to be reported.
Funding
The Patient Safety Authority, which has an 11-member board, is to be financed by a $105-per-bed surcharge on the reporting institutions, totaling $5 million a year. It's a cost that hospitals do not take on lightly.
"Because of our investment, we are hopeful we get back usable information to make some of those changes," said Dr. John Combes, the senior medical adviser to the Hospital and Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania.
Reports are to be made over the Internet. The authority is negotiating a contract with ECRI, formerly the Emergency Care Research Institute, to analyze the reports of mistakes or near-mistakes and return recommendations to improve practices.
Electronic Data Systems Corp. and the Institute for Safe Medication Practices are subcontractors, Muscalus said.
Though most information reported to the authority is to be kept private and not subject to the Right to Know Law, annual reports from the authority are to be public.
Those reports are to include the number of mistakes and near-mistakes reported, with trending information on geography and type of mistake, plus the authority's recommendations for statutory or regulatory changes to improve patient safety.