Limitations of Incident Reporting System

Legal Reporting in Health Care
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Legal Reporting in Health Care
Incident Reporting Systems (IRS) is a cornerstone for improving patient safety but can also have many limitations. One such limitation is that IRS cannot be used to compare organizations. Healthcare leaders and patients often want to be able to compare patient safety among health systems, hospitals, and healthcare providers. However, this comparison is only possible due to underreporting and bias in the system. Therefore, taking caution when using IRS to compare healthcare providers or their organizations is important. The National Coordinating Council for Medication Error Reporting Systems (NCC-MERP) even explicitly states that data from these systems should not be used to compare healthcare providers or their organizations (Pham et al., 2013).
Another area for improvement of Incident Reporting Systems is that they cannot measure changes over time. Validity error rates are required to make inferences about safety changes over time. Unfortunately, IRS does not provide such information. For example, The Joint Commission required hospitals to implement a ti...