Dynamic rather than static performance measures are needed to improve patient safety

Selected performance measures have been proposed to reduce clinical laboratory errors as a means of reducing medical errors. Yet, whereas this static list of measures are all quality-related, they are not all patient-safety related. For example, the specimen rejection rate is actually measuring a laboratory's ability to detect errors, which is a good thing. Moreover, a static list does not account for new errors or an improved error rate for items on the list. A dynamic list of patient-safety errors, informed by a FRACAS (Failure Review and Corrective Action System) overcomes these objections, since the list of performance measures is periodically refreshed by error data from the clinical laboratory. While new to clinical laboratories, FRACAS has been successfully used in the medical device industry.