Identifying barriers and benefits of patient safety event reporting toward user-centered design

Background: To learn from errors, electronic patient safety event reporting systems (e-reporting systems) have been widely adopted to collect medical incidents from the frontline practitioners in US hospitals. However, two issues of underreporting and low-quality of reports pervade and thus the system effectiveness remains dubious. Methods: This study employing semi-structured interviews of health professionals in the Texas Medical Center investigated the perceived benefits and barriers from users who have used e-reporting systems. Results: As a result, the perceived benefits include the enhanced convenience in data processing and the assistant functions leading to patient safety enhancement. The perceived barriers to the acceptance and quality use of the system include the lack of instructions, lack of reporter-friendly classifications, lack of time, and lack of feedback. The identified benefits and barriers help design a user-centered e-reporting system where learning and assistant features are discussed during the interviews. Conclusions: As a response, the learning and assistant features aiming at enhancing benefits and removing barriers of e-reporting systems should be included for facilitating the acceptance and effective use of the systems.