Thank you for your interest in learning about the Patient Safety Navigator.
This tool was built to help Massachusetts health care providers navigate key state and federal requirements for reporting adverse and other events that affect patient safety.
Our goals:
- Increase available data on patient safety. Self-reporting by providers is one way to collect information about some of the more serious threats to patient safety.
- Increase awareness among providers about their reporting responsibilities to drive change in their internal systems for capturing this information. Studies show that providers underreport adverse events, often due to inadequate internal systems for recognizing and acknowledging harm incidents.
- Improve the quality of the information provided to the state. Tools are provided here to help providers improve their analysis and communication around adverse events, which will lead to stronger understandings of what went wrong, increasing opportunities to prevent mistakes from recurring.
- Map out the current patient safety reporting requirements to help identify both redundancies and gaps in statewide collection of this data. More than a dozen reporting categories covering 50+ discrete reportable patient safety events are reported to state and federal agencies using a variety of reporting mechanisms from sophisticated web-based portals to paper-based submissions.
Numerous state agencies and not-for-profit organizations were involved in helping us develop and verify the content in the Navigator. To date, the feedback we have received from the medical community has been overwhelmingly positive. Feel free to explore the site as a provider might. We welcome any feedback you have on the Navigator or opportunities to improve the clarity or efficacy of the state’s collection of key data about patient safety.
An overview of patient safety reporting requirements, by provider type
