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Safety in primary care: administrative errors are a common culprit

Ambulatory Safety Monitor, January 9, 2003

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Safety in primary care: administrative errors are a common culprit

Hospital patient safety experts tend to focus on medication errors and wrong-site surgery. But those looking to improve safety in primary care might want to work on cleaning up physician filing systems and improving communication with patients, a recent study recommends. Administrative dysfunction accounted for 82.6% of the errors.

What should you do? Focus on the following areas to ensure a safer patient environment at your center:

- Clean up your administrative processes. Consider computerizing medical records. Most of the physicians involved in the study relied on paper medical records (73%) and did not have access to the Internet (83%).

- Ensure complete and accurate filing systems. Filing errors may seem innocuous, but these problems can result in harm. For example, a child could miss an immunization or get a duplicate shot because the data in the files wasn't kept up-to-date

- Beware of filing family notes together. This can cause mix-ups when family members have the same name.

To view the full survey results, click here

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