The National Quality Forum (NQF), on behalf of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), is coordinating a process to obtain comments from stakeholders about the “Common Formats” authorized by the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005 (Patient Safety Act). Of note, this process will use relevant elements of the NQF expert panel procedures to receive and review comments; however, it will not involve endorsement of any product(s). NQF is now receiving comments on the initial release version of the Common Formats -- Version 0.1 Beta. You may submit comments using our commenting tool (see link on left). The information collected and analyzed by NQF will provide feedback to AHRQ for subsequent releases of the Common Formats.
BACKGROUND: The Patient Safety Act contained several major elements, one of which establishes a framework through which hospitals, physicians, and other healthcare providers can work to improve healthcare quality in a protected legal environment of specially designated patient safety organizations (PSO). The Patient Safety Act authorizes the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to “facilitate the creation of and maintain a network of patient safety databases” to accept, aggregate, and analyze non-identifiable patient safety work product, and then make information on trends and patterns in healthcare errors available to the public. To facilitate this data analysis and reporting, the Patient Safety Act authorized the Secretary of HHS to determine Common Formats for reporting to and among the network of patient safety databases.
The Secretary of DHHS requested AHRQ to coordinate the development of the Common Formats for patient safety events. The term Common Formats is used to describe the technical requirements pertaining to collection and reporting of patient safety data, including all supporting material. The Common Formats include:
descriptions of patient safety events and unsafe conditions to be reported,
delineation of data elements to be collected for different types of events,
examples of patient safety population reports,
a metadata registry with data element attributes and technical specifications,
paper forms to allow immediate implementation, and
a users guide.
Common Formats delineate definitional and reporting specifications that allow healthcare providers to collect and submit standardized information regarding patient safety events.
To develop Common Formats – Version 0.1 Beta, AHRQ conducted extensive review of existing patient safety event reporting systems, position statements regarding patient safety incident reporting, and related literature. AHRQ conducted work group sessions with federal partners and listening sessions with the public. Additionally, further refinement resulted from testing of the common formats by several federal partners that operate healthcare facilities including the Department of Defense, Indian Health Services, and the Veterans Health Administration.
The Common Formats establish a common method for all healthcare providers to collect and submit information for any patient safety event. Use of the Common Formats will assure consistency of reporting among PSOs as they begin to standardize the collection of patient safety event information through the use of a common language and definitions. The main purposes of the Common Formats are to:
AHRQ has provided funding in support of this project. For more information about the Common Formats visit the AHRQ website.
For more information about the NQF project to collect comments about
the Common Formats, contact Melinda L. Murphy at 202.531.0550 or mlmurphy@qualityforum.org .