Ask HRC: Limitations of National Benchmarks for Adverse Events

​Healthcare Risk Control (HRC) members often ask for help finding national rates of specific types of adverse events so that they can benchmark their performance against that of other organizations and identify priorities for improvement. Benchmarking may be helpful, but there are some important caveats.

First, national data is often difficult to find. Rates of some adverse events are reported on Hospital Compare, but for many other events,...