Where are health IT patient safety event reports hiding? Identifying health IT patient safety events in self-reported databases

Introduction: The objective of this paper is to describe a manual annotation process to identify likely health information technology (IT) related patient safety event (PSE) reports and the descriptive analysis of the self-reported event type categories of the resulting likely health IT related events. Methods: 5287 PSE reports were manually coded as likely or unlikely related to health IT and the structured general and specific event type categories were analyzed. Results: Of the 2435 likely health IT related events, 1200 were categorized as medication error events, 709 described an error related to a procedure, treatment, or test, and the remaining events were distributed among 19 different general event types. Discussion: The variety of self-reported general and specific event categories indicates a potential need to provide additional support for individuals reporting events to capture contextual nuances and incorporating advanced techniques to assist researchers and safety officers in identifying health IT related events.