A. E. Graham1, I. Benjenk1, B. Umapathi1 1George Washington University School Of Medicine And Health Sciences,Washington, DC, USA
Introduction:
The landmark Institute of Medicine report “To Err is Human” was released in 1999 and since then increased attention has been placed on healthcare incident reporting. Despite concerted efforts of hospitals and other organizations, improvements in patient care derived from incident reporting have lagged behind goals. At most hospitals, the overwhelming majority of incident reports are placed by allied providers. However, physician participation is required to get a balanced view of system errors in large academic institutions. Young physicians in particular need to be involved in reporting, evaluation, and system-based practice change. One of the largest hurdles to physician participation is access to reporting platforms. To address this, a new feature of the hospital’s HIPAA compliant texting application was added in the fall of 2017 so that providers could report incidents on their personal mobile phones instead of going through a computer-based application.
Methods:
The study was conducted at George Washington University Hospital. Monthly total incident reports from pre-intervention January 2017- June 2017 and post-intervention January-June 2018 were reviewed and categorized by method of reporting (computer vs. text) and position of reporter (physician, resident, other). An anonymous survey was given to 39 resident physicians to further evaluate resident participation. Descriptive statistics were performed in Excel and SPSS.
Results:
There was a 70.4% increase in incident reporting between our pre- and post-intervention periods (from 3090 to 5265). In the post-intervention period, 14.25% of incident reports were submitted through secure text message (750 reports). Of the 750, 585 (78%) were from physicians. Of the increase in total incident reporting, 34.4% was due to text message reporting and 26.8% was due to text message reporting by physicians. Of the residents surveyed, 53% reported submitting a report. Of those who had reported an incident, 95.2% reported it as “very easy” or “fairly easy” to submit a report via text message, as compared to 9.5% who reported it as “very easy” or “fairly easy” to submit a report via computer application (p <0.01). Of those who had reported an incident, 76% reported having submitted more reports via text message than via computer, 14.2% reporting similar amounts, and 9.5% submitting more via computer.
Conclusion:
Institution of a mobile text app significantly increased physician participation in patient incident reporting. Our study shows that physicians, especially resident physicians, are more comfortable with mobile app-based patient safety reporting, and this is a viable model for the future.
