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New York State Department of Health - NYPORTS

Work in Progress

The Department of Health is committed to continuously improving the quality of care and increasing patient safety for hospital patients of New York State. NYPORTS plays a critical role in achieving these goals. Ongoing concerns for NYPORTS include:

• The Department will continue to improve NYPORTS through further refinement of definitions and improvement in the reporting process. The Refinement subcommittee is responsible for the task of clarifying language in the electronic system and manuals. They will also examine the includes and excludes list to determine whether codes need to be modified, added or deleted.
• The Department will provide ongoing training to hospitals regarding proper implementation, system improvements, and changes in definitions to NYPORTS.
• The Department will monitor reporting compliance through overall hospital surveillance activities and appropriate enforcement actions and sanctions will be taken for continued failure to report as required. Chart reviews by an independent outside agent will continue to identify missed NYPORTS events.
• The Department will continue to identify Root Causes and Risk Reduction Strategies. This information will be shared with hospitals to support improvement in patient care systems.
• The Department will continue to issue NYPORTS News and Alert on a quarterly basis, or as needed, to disseminate patient safety related information to facilities.
• The Department will continue its collaboration with the University at Albany School of Public Health to analyze and extract patient safety data from NYPORTS.
• NYPORTS subcommittees will remain active in their pursuit of improvements to the system. The Medication Error subcommittee will examine data specific to medication related occurrences. Root causes and corrective actions will be identified by the group and shared with facilities. The RCA subcommittee will focus on changes to the RCA form and process, and suggest improvements to the system.
• The Department will continue its work on the New York State Safety Improvement Demonstration Project in order to reach its goals to improve the completeness of reporting in NYPORTS, to identify the causes of preventable errors and patient injury in health care using the Root Cause Analysis process, and to develop, demonstrate and evaluate strategies for reducing adverse events and improving patient safety through hospital interventions.
• The Department will continue to work with Island Peer Review Organization (IPRO), in their medical record review process, to verify hospital reporting compliance. IPRO will identify those hospitals that have high reporting rates and will examine their systems to extract meaningful strategies. These strategies will be shared with hospitals that are identified as low reporters, in order to bolster improvement activities with respect to occurrence reporting.