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6 Benefits of Incident Reporting in Healthcare

Performance Health Partners April 21, 2023

Patient Safety Incident Reporting Health IT

benefits of incident reporting in healthcare

Incident reporting is an essential responsibility of healthcare organizations to improve patient safety and quality care today. When done well, incident and event reporting mitigate future risk, reducing potential harm. There are many benefits of incident reporting in healthcare, today we’ll cover six of them.

Here are six benefits of healthcare incident reporting:

1. Incident Reporting Improves Quality and Safety

The number one benefit of healthcare incident reporting is improving quality of care and patient safety. Healthcare organizations focus on improving patient safety and care quality by consistently evaluating and improving their clinical processes and other patient-related operations. Therefore, incident and event reporting help identify areas of quality improvement.

2. Reduces Risk of Reoccurrence

One of the most powerful benefits of incident reporting in healthcare is reducing the risk of reoccurrence. When healthcare providers can easily capture, analyze, and share data, they can proactively act on potentially harmful situations to minimize further escalation.

3. Facilitates a Learning Culture

The majority of clinicians and healthcare staff want to learn and readily accept instruction on improving. That's true whether an incident involves them, a coworker in their department, or a staff member in another part of the organization. In addition, staff who learn from their own or others' mistakes can help prevent incidents. Ultimately, event reporting in healthcare can reduce the risks of reoccurrences.

4. Analytics

Accurate data is essential for increasing patient safety. Utilizing customized dashboards with drill-through analytics tools allow healthcare teams to drill down into data across multiple departments and turn vast amounts of data into actionable decisions.

Powerful analytic tools within healthcare incident reporting systems help healthcare organizations leverage and trend data to prevent any future incidents.

5. Improves Employee Engagement

Another benefit of incident reporting in healthcare is that it encourages and engages employees to participate in the safety of their workplace and patients. It helps create and demonstrates a culture of trust and transparency among the staff, rather than just following protocols.

A culture that promotes event reporting in healthcare improves employee engagement by giving them a voice. As a result, employees are more likely to report incidents in a blame-free environment without fear of punishment or negative repercussions.

A high level of employee engagement is related to retention, patient-centered care, patient safety culture, and employees' positive assessments of their team's quality of care or services.¹

Using a healthcare incident reporting system that recognizes employees for noticing and reporting patient safety risks, like good catches and near misses, helps improve employee engagement through healthcare incident reporting.

A hospital good catch program can be an effective means to improve patient safety. Good catches occur up to 100 times more frequently than Serious Events but often go underreported. Recognizing and rewarding staff can encourage good catch submissions and provide more opportunities to improve patient safety.²

6. Improve Brand Reputation

The benefits of incident reporting in healthcare impact stakeholders by improving your business reputation. An often-overlooked benefit of improving incident response time and reducing accidents is the positive impact on an organization’s reputation.

Your company becomes known as a safe place to work, which increases retention and attracts new hires. It also helps you avoid negative publicity that might discourage new business.

Incident Reporting in Healthcare

Benefits of Incident Reporting in Healthcare Conclusion

Incident reporting in healthcare improves the quality of patient care and positively impacts everyone involved. When organizations prioritize incident reporting in healthcare, they can improve patient safety and get closer to zero harm.

Implementing a healthcare incident reporting solution can strengthen collaboration between risk and quality teams for safer patient care. With incident reporting software from Performance Health Partners, healthcare organizations use real-time reporting and analytics to prevent harmful safety events, while driving patient safety improvements.

Learn more about the benefits of incident reporting in healthcare for your organization.