Design Effective Voluntary Medical Incident Reporting Systems: A Literature Review

Voluntary medical incident reporting systems (VMIR) are an application of information technology to support medical errors reporting for health professionals and thus ultimately improve healthcare quality and patient safety. The overall goal of this paper was to investigate the usage and effective design of VMIR by literature review. We expected to uncover design potentials from prior studies by examining on both incident reports analysis and system design, by which to establish a user-centered design framework that integrates identified factors for advancing VMIR effectiveness and efficiency. All papers regarding voluntary reporting system were identified through systematic electronic database searches. Three eligibility criteria were applied: 1) voluntary programs; 2) information system; 3) medical incident/error reporting. Of 8 eligible articles identified, the main themes are about current systems' shortcomings on underreporting, report quality, standardized nomenclature/taxonomy, communication, usability as well as reporting culture and environment. Eventually, all of identified concerns in the study will be addressed in a VMIR system prototyping process to attack the shortcomings aforementioned.