Making Sense of Patient Safety Event Data

Over the past two decades, the focus on capturing and understanding patient safety events has led to the development of several initiatives and programs in hospitals across the country to increase the reporting of these events. Computerized reporting systems are an integral part of these programs. With these systems going live, hospitals now have databases that contain large numbers of patient safety event reports. Now, the challenge is to make sense of and effectively analyze the data by examining trends and predicting future events. The purpose of this practice-orientated paper is to describe and demonstrate how to apply advances in information visualization techniques and methods to patient safety event data with the goal of making these data more understandable and actionable. We will discuss the process of how we developed patient safety event visualizations for a multi-hospital healthcare system and provide visualization techniques, resources, guidelines, and practical examples.