Identify patient safety incidents and get an overall measure of unanticipated patient harm due to care in your hospital.
The literature suggests that traditional methods of identifying patient safety incidents (i.e., incident reporting systems, non-triggered chart reviews) capture only 10–20% of errors. Of these reported errors, 90–95% result in no harm to patients.
Applying trigger tools to a chart review process gives organizations an effective way to estimate the frequency and extent of patient safety incidents. Triggers (e.g., specific medications, laboratory values) provide clues to patient safety incidents, and a chart review allows you to determine whether or not a true patient safety incident did occur.
Strategies for improving safety can be evaluated in part if the number of patient safety incidents changes. In essence, trigger tools offer a strategy for measuring safety over time.