Network of Patient Safety Databases

NORC developed and operates the Patient Safety Research Coordinating Center for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's Patient Safety Initiative. As a part of this project, NORC supports the agency’s work to implement the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005.

NORC's principal tasks center on:

completion of an inventory of existing patient safety incident reporting systems (PSIRS), and
development of reports and other materials to assist in the development of the “Common Formats” called for by the patient safety legislation.

The PSIRS inventory collects diverse metadata about patient safety incident reporting systems; no data on specific incidents are collected. Key information includes the variable elements captured through the systems’ reporting forms, reporting and data entry instructions, data dictionaries, code books, taxonomies, sample reports generated from the system, and descriptive information about the system. As of late 2006, approximately 60 PSIRS had contributed data to the inventory, representing a mix of Federal agencies, states, collaborative entities, commercial vendors, individual hospitals and hospital systems, and other countries. The inventory also compiles information relevant to patient safety that is not associated with a specific PSIRS, for example, definitions of patient safety terms and position statements regarding patient safety incident reporting.

All inventory materials are catalogued in a sophisticated web-accessible electronic database, called the Meta Data Inventory System or MDIS, which permits users to easily find and organize specific metadata; complete uploads of source documents are also provided.

To support AHRQ’s development of Common Formats, data from the MDIS have been used to produce two summary reports. The first report presents metadata about all variable elements captured by any of the participating PSIRS, grouped into conceptually similar categories. Thus, for example, one can see at a glance how various systems collect data on specific types of errors, factors contributing to errors, outcomes from the error, process changes made as a result of any investigation, etc. The second report is a compilation of all definitions found for each patient safety term.

As new information becomes available for the inventory, NORC continues to add the metadata to the MDIS and periodically updates reports of variable elements and definitions.