The Opportunity 

When a patient is harmed while receiving healthcare services it often must be reported to multiple different, unaligned patient safety event reporting programs. Unfortunately, this lack of standardized reporting limits the healthcare industry’s ability to consistently interpret, reliably quantify, and systematically address harm events and creates additional administrative burden. 

Harmonizing unaligned patient safety event definitions and reporting frameworks is needed to enable systematic measurement, tracking, and reporting on the prevalence and impact of harm events, and ultimately, to reduce preventable harm. A systematic review published in BMJ Open Quality in 2023 concluded that the lack of alignment on terminology and reporting structures for patient safety events impedes our ability to learn from these events and reduce their occurrence.

About the Project 

Through a public-private partnership, the Focus on HARM (Harmonizing Accountability in Reporting and Monitoring) initiative aims to reduce preventable harm by updating SRE criteria and harmonizing reporting. Key actions include:

• Reviewing and updating the SRE list to reflect today’s full range of care delivery settings and ensure the list continues to be relevant to care delivery today and enables robust meaningful cross-state comparisons, benchmarking, and trending. 
• Harmonizing various safety measurement taxonomies to eliminate redundancies and inconsistencies. 
• Establishing a consensus-based unified framework and taxonomy of healthcare harms and safety events, with specific data definitions and reporting standards. 
• NQF and The Joint Commission are working together to align the SRE and Sentinel Event taxonomies—two of the most widely used—to streamline the measurement ecosystem, reducing measurement burden and increasing measurement value. 
• Developing a new, specific implementation guidance to help different reporting systems—including the 25-plus states currently using the SRE list—better harmonize SRE definitions, report safety events more consistently, and reduce administrative burden. 

Contact Information

For more information, please contact the project team at patientsafety@qualityforum.org