AHRQ Plans to Develop Consumer Adverse Event Reporting System

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has requested that the Office of Management and Budget approve its proposal for the development of a prototype consumer reporting system to capture patient safety events. Currently, there is no mechanism for consumers to report information about patient safety events that are defined as an incident or near miss by the AHRQ Common Formats used to report events to federally certified patient safety organizations. AHRQ believes that collecting this data is necessary to inform research on how to improve the quality of healthcare, promote patient safety, and reduce medical errors.