On 13 August 2010, a technology-enabled solutions and services provider announced that this summer Denmark's National Board of Health will launch a web-based system which enables patients, citizens and healthcare professionals to report adverse incidents in any part of the Danish health system.

The aim of the adverse-incident reporting system is to improve patient safety by ensuring that any event which may compromise the safe treatment of patients in the health system is logged and then analysed at local, municipal and national levels. The launch will make the Danish health authority the first to have a national adverse-incident system accessible to all relevant healthcare professionals.

The new system will supersede the National Board of Health's safety reporting system which was set up in 2004 to cover Danish hospitals. It will include all areas of Danish healthcare and will be more comprehensive in the nature and detail of adverse events that can be brought to the attention of the authorities.

The system is being integrated within the Danish Health Data Network to provide caseworkers with quick and secure access to reported incidents and provide tools for their investigation, such as transversal analysis and statistical reporting. To save on administration time, the system also automatically generates reports which can be tailored to the classification of the incident, the time period over which it caused concern, the type of affected department and the local area where it occurred. Incidents are recorded and categorised according to the World Health Organization's (WHO) recommendations for the international classification of patient safety.

The system is based on a special government edition of an incident-management reporting application developed by a healthcare software company. This software was designed to allow governing bodies to gain better insight into the incidents that affect their hospitals and citizens. It also enables governing bodies to communicate lessons learnt from one part of the healthcare system to other healthcare professionals in order to guard against repeating the same events elsewhere in the country's health system.

Freddy Lykke, a managing director at the healthcare software company which produced the new system, said: "Patient safety is obviously a number one concern in any healthcare service and this system allows everyone involved to learn from incidents noted country wide by other healthcare workers, patients and members of the public. For instance, if a patient were given the wrong medicine, the system allows the authorities to ask the pharmacist for their input before any recommendations are made and shared."

The project follows an EU tender in autumn 2009, and the system is currently being installed.

Further information:

• Original news article - eHealthNews.eu Portal
• The Danish National Board of Health (in Danish and in English)