Real-time patient and family member technology-enabled safety observation reporting demonstrated feasibility and elicited reports not otherwise identified, according to a study published in the Journal of Hospital Medicine. Naomi S. Bardach, MD, MAS, and colleagues tested a system designed to gather safety observations from hospitalized patients and their family members via a real-time mobile health tool that was piloted during June 2017-April 2018 on the medical-surgical unit of a children’s hospital. They assessed: 1) face validity by comparing observations to incident reporting (IR) criteria and to hospital IRs, and 2) associations between the number of safety observations/ 100 patient-days and participant characteristics using Poisson regression. Among 235 patients, there were 8.15 safety reports/100 patient-days, most frequently regarding medications (29%) and communication (20%). Latinx participants submitted fewer observations than White participants (3.9 vs 10.1); participants with more prior hospitalizations submitted more observations.
