Applied Strategies for Improving Patient Safety (ASIPS) is a collaborative effort between the University of Colorado Department of Family Medicine and numerous organizations to analyze the causes and effects of errors in primary care and reduce the incidence of errors. ASIPS will collect reports of errors or incidents through the Patient Safety Reporting System, a voluntary incident reporting system. The system offers three different ways to confidentially or anonymously report an error: via web site, telephone hotline, or paper. For confidential reports, ASIPS researchers will collect additional information about the incident to help define and describe the event. This information will include a systems analysis, a practice analysis, and an assessment of patient harm and patient awareness of the event. After 10 days, all confidential reports will be de-identified to protect patients and clinicians from unintentional disclosure of sensitive information. In addition to the primary data obtained from the Patient Safety Reporting System, ASIPS researchers will analyze secondary data provided by collaborating Colorado organizations. Using these secondary data, ASIPS researchers will assess the specific incidents and trends that may or may not be reported to the CU DFM, as well as trends occurring in larger populations of practices. Based on the understanding of primary care errors that evolves from both data analyses, ASIPS will develop and implement interventions aimed at decreasing recognized errors in primary care. The interventions will be developed by clinicians and staff from practices, with guidance from ASIPS partners, including two insurance organizations, the State Department of Health and the Colorado Hospital Association. The interventions will be examined using a before-and-after design. The setting for ASIPS is a combination of two practice-based research networks, the Colorado Research Network (CaReNet), which focuses on rural and urban minority and underserved primary care populations, and the High Plains Research Network (HPRN), which focuses on rural, """"""""frontier"""""""" primary care practices and hospitals.
