Monday April 23 2:43 PM EST

U.S. Aims to Improve Data on Medical Errors

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Aiming to prevent potentially
deadly medical errors, the Bush administration on
Monday launched an effort to establish a confidential
database on the Internet of mistakes made by doctors
and hospitals.

The database would draw on information already being
given to states or the federal government and would
not be available to the general public to check up on
blunders committed by any specific doctor or hospital,
according to officials from the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services (news - web sites).

The project is intended to help government regulators
and medical professionals spot trends in mistakes in
an effort to avoid repeating them, while cutting
through the red tape that hinders reporting on such
errors, officials said.

The HHS agencies spearheading the effort are the
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (news - web
sites), the Food and Drug Administration (news - web
sites), and the Health Care Financing Administration.

``What the public will gain from this system is
improved health care because this is going to make
available to (health care) providers at all levels
information that's going to allow them to learn from
errors and to enhance safety,'' Dr. Gregg Meyer,
director of AHRQ's Center for Quality Improvement and
Patient Safety, told Reuters.

Experts said in a 1999 report that medical errors kill
between 44,000 and 98,000 people annually, with up to
7,000 of those deaths resulting from mistakes in
prescribing or dispensing drugs.

HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson on Monday announced the
formation of a task force to seek ways to improve the
collection of data on patient safety. Thompson asked
the task force to devise a user-friendly
Internet-based patient safety reporting system that
would enable faster cross-matching and electronic
analysis of reports on medical errors.

Concern Over A ``Data Graveyard''

A number of states require health care providers to
report on mistakes, while federal agencies collect
such information provided on a voluntary basis. But
whether this data is being put to good use is
questionable.

Meyer said he was concerned that reports on medical
mistakes currently may reside in a ``data graveyard.''
For example, he said experts examining dialysis
centers were forced to sift by hand through reports to
three government agencies that, once considered
together, showed that certain cleaning techniques used
on dialysis machines caused deadly infections.

``Someone had to sit down and hand match data that the
government was already collecting,'' Meyer said. ``We
think that just simply doesn't make sense, and is not
a situation that can be carried forward.''

Thompson announced the initiative during a meeting of
officials from medical professional organizations,
state health departments, state licensure boards,
accrediting bodies and patient advocacy groups.

``Working with our state and private-sector partners,
we can make much better use of the information we
already collect, and we can translate that information
into quality gains for patients,'' Thompson said in a
statement. ``At the same time, we will streamline the
reporting burdens that providers face today, and we
will make important findings more accessible, more
quickly to the providers who need to know.''

Meyer said the initiative is not aimed at producing a
database naming individual doctors involved in medical
mistakes.

``In terms of having this be a data bank of
provider-level error rates, that's not the direction
that we're going,'' he said. ``The reason we're not
going there is that what we have learned from research
is that the way to approach patient safety is to take
a systems-based approach to get away from that old
system of name, blame and shame.''

Meyer said it may take a year or two to put in place
the task force recommendations. Officials said the
department's budget request for the next fiscal year
seeks $72 million for efforts to improve patient
safety and reduce errors.