National Healthcare Safety Measures
The National Action Alliance uses multiple resources to measure trends in patient and workforce safety. Links to these resources and descriptions of them are below. Use these measurement resources to understand trends in patient safety at the national level and benchmark safety standards at your organization.
Chartbook on Patient Safety
The Patient Safety Chartbook is part of a family of documents and tools that support the National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Report (QDR) and includes a summary of trends across those patient safety measures reported in the QDR.
AHRQ Quality and Safety Review System
The Quality and Safety Review System (QSRS) measures the rate of adverse events among hospital patients covered by Medicare and creates a nationally representative baseline to assess the impact of ongoing patient safety improvement initiatives.
Visit the QSRS page to explore the updated "Adverse Events Among In-Hospital Medicare Patients" report, developed by AHRQ in collaboration with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. This report provides a detailed analysis of adverse events (AEs) experienced by Medicare patients hospitalized in 2021 and 2022. The report examines 41 types of AEs and composite measures, with comparative analyses conducted by sex and age group. In 2021, 7.1% of Medicare patients experienced at least one AE per hospital stay, with 83.6 AEs per 1,000 discharges. These rates improved in 2022, decreasing to 6.2% of patients and 71.1 AEs per 1,000 discharges.
For AEs where the population at risk numbered at least 100, the highest rates for both 2021 and 2022 were worsening pressure injuries that were present on admission (2021: 4.9%, 2022: 6.0%), hypoglycemic events (4.7% for both years), and AEs related to intravenous unfractionated heparin (2021: 4.2%, 2022: 3.0%).
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