President Bush on Friday signed into law the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act (S 544), which will create a national patient-safety database to encourage voluntary reporting of medical errors, Modern Physician reports.
The bill, which was passed by the House on Wednesday and the Senate on July 21, guarantees the confidentiality of reported medical errors and shields providers from liability lawsuits. Patient-safety organizations will collect the data, analyze it and recommend steps to avoid mistakes in the future, Modern Physician reports.
The law "will remove legal roadblocks, thereby allowing health care providers to focus upon solving problems rather than worrying about lawsuits," said Chip Kahn, president of the Federation of American Hospitals (Fong, Modern Physician, 7/29).
When signing the bill, Bush said the law will help researchers obtain more accurate information about treatments, adding, "And by providing doctors with information about what treatments work and what treatments cause problems, we will reduce medical errors that injure and cause the deaths of thousands of Americans each year," the Chicago Tribune reports (Japsen, Chicago Tribune, 7/30).
Reaction
J. Edward Hill, president of the American Medical Association, said the law is "the catalyst we need to transform the current culture of blame and punishment into one of open communication and prevention." He added, "Future errors can be avoided as we learn from past mistakes. This law strikes the proper balance between confidentiality and the need to ensure responsibility throughout the health care system."
However, some observers said the law does not guarantee that providers will report their mistakes and others criticized the legislation for failing to include federal penalties for mistakes, according to the Tribune. Margaret Van Amringe, vice president for public policy and government relations for the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, said, "There's no incentive to report useful information if you know it is going to be used against you. If you don't have the information then you are not going to solve the problem." JCAHO said it might be one of the groups charged with creating a subsidiary "patient safety organization" (Chicago Tribune, 7/30).