The Patient Safety Network (PSNet) of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) recently developed triggers and trigger tools as the latest patient safety primer for health systems and hospitals.
Now, health professionals can have targeted injury detection systems -- which are also called triggers -- to detect safety events for patients. This is just one of the many ways that the health industry strives to improve patient safety and care.
Triggers are a good way to quickly analyze a variety of medical records to find safety events for patients. The analysis looks at how frequently safety events happen and then tracks how the safety initiatives progress throughout time.
With these triggers, health professionals can review the patient’s medical records to see if there are any safety event concerns for the patient in the past, or potential ones in the future.
When the trigger discovers an adverse event, the analysis will show the various causes, in addition to contributing factors to the safety event. Experts can then stage interventions to stop the events from happening in the future.
Triggers are valuable because of their efficiency. Making a comprehensive review of each medical record that a patient has can take significant amounts of time. To make triggers more useful, users should be trained to correctly interpret the triggers.
