The Medical Event Reporting System for Transfusion Medicine: will it help get the right blood to the right patient?

The Medical Event Reporting System for Transfusion Medicine (MERS-TM) collects, classifies, and analyzes events that potentially could compromise the safety of transfused blood to facilitate system improvement. This system is designed to collect data on near misses as well as actual events. Near-miss events are a valuable source of data because they occur more frequently than, but share many characteristics and causes of, actual events. Further, although most current reporting efforts describe only what has occurred with little attention to what caused the event, MERS-TM includes a standardized method of causal analysis. The standardization provided by MERS allows users to compare their experience with that of other organizations, which speeds learning across the entire transfusion medicine community. Important features of the MERS-TM system are that it is able to capture threats, hazards, near misses, injuries, and deaths; characterizes failures and recoveries systematically; identifies and provides causal codes for the entire range of system defects including technical, organizational, cultural, and human factors; raises staff awareness about error management; is easily integrated with existing quality assurance programs; has a consistent and straightforward classification method; enables compliance with mandatory Food and Drug Administration reporting and accreditation requirements; has features to deal with a high volume of reports; supplies Web-based training, data entry, and analysis; and provides comparative benchmarks from comparable institutions.

Managing the prevention of retained surgical instruments: what is the value of counting?

OBJECTIVE: Preventing retained foreign bodies is critical for patient safety. However, the value of counting surgical instruments and the reliability of the information provided have never been quantified. This study examines the diagnostic characteristics of counting and its impact on surgical costs. METHODS: We examined data from the Medical Event Reporting System-Total HealthSystem (MERS-TH), administrative hospital, and the New York State Cardiac Surgery Report databases (2000-2004). The cost per count discrepancy was examined by studying a cohort of patients undergoing coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery. Linear and logistic multivariable regression models were used for statistical analysis. RESULTS: Of 153,263 operations, there were 1062 count discrepancies. The rate of retained items was 1 of 7000 surgeries or 1 of 70 discrepancy cases. Final count discrepancies identified 77% and prevented 54% of retained items. The sensitivity of counting was 77.2%, specificity was 99.2%, but the positive predictive value was only 1.6%. Count discrepancies increased with surgery duration, late time procedures, and number of nursing teams. Bypass time, intravenous nitroglycerin injections, or myocardial infarction in the previous 24 hours were independent predictors of count discrepancies in CABG surgery. The incremental OR cost for CABG because of a count discrepancy was $932. Nationally, this would amount to an additional $24 million/yr in OR CABG cost. CONCLUSIONS: This study, for the first time, quantifies the diagnostic accuracy of counting and defines the parameters against which alternative strategies of prevention should be measured, before being adopted in standard practice.