Patient Safety Glossary
a
- Adverse Event – Any medical intervention such as a test, treatment, hospitalization or surgery can result in an undesirable outcome that is not…
- Alert fatigue (also called alarm fatigue) – Because of poor design of electronic health records and medical systems, doctors, nurses and other clinicians routinely have to override…
d
- Dangling approval – An accelerated drug approval that continues even though a confirmatory trial has not validated that the drug has clinical benefit…
- Diagnostic error – Estimates indicate most people in the United States might experience a meaningful diagnostic error at some point in their lives,…
- Differential diagnosis – A list of possible conditions that could be causing a patient’s symptoms. A differential diagnosis is a systemic process that…
e
- Endocrine-disrupting chemical – Human-made substances that interfere with human hormones and are associated with a variety of health problems. Deeper dive Biomonitoring shows…
f
- Failure to rescue – Failure or delay in recognizing and responding to a hospitalized patient who is experiencing a complication after surgery. Failure to…
h
- Hospital-acquired conditions – People too often suffer medical complications in hospitals that might have been avoided with better care. These include infections, sepsis,…
m
- Medical error/preventable adverse event – Medical error is commonly defined as “the failure of a planned action to be completed as intended or the use…
n
- Near miss – Incidents that would have led to an adverse event if it hadn’t been for luck or early detection far outnumber…
- Never event/serious reportable event – Some adverse events do serious harm and are considered to be entirely preventable. Examples are surgery on the wrong site…
o
- Overdiagnosis, Overtreatment – There’s been growing awareness in recent years of the risk posed to patients from exposure to tests and treatments that…
p
- Patient harm – This is a blanket term for harm to a patient that results from medical care or a failure to provide…
- Prior authorization – Insurers sometimes ask doctors and other clinicians to provide more information about intended treatments and medicines for patients before agreeing…
r
- Root cause analyses – Root cause analyses, or RCAs, are performed by interdisciplinary teams involving everyone who is closest to the incident, and they…
s
- Staffing shortages – The stresses of the pandemic are considered likely to cause more doctors, nurses and other health professionals to retire early…
- Surgical site infection – An infection of the surgical site within 30 days of the operative procedure. Abbreviated as SSI, it’s considered a preventable…
v
- Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) – The COVID pandemic drew new attention to the system the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for…