Critical Incident Reporting System - CIRS mobile – record critical incidents on location

Abstract

Critical incidents happen in 2%‒8% of hospitalisations. The number of deaths by preventable adverse events is greater than those of flu, AIDS and traffic accidents combined. To reduce those preventable adverse events and to increase the patient’s safety, it is important to not only react when a preventable adverse event happened but also to be aware of the near misses. One possible way to detect near misses is to introduce a Critical Incident Reporting System (CIRS). The goal of this project was to develop a CIRS for mobile devices. Although mobile devices are not suitable for text input, they could possibly close a gap in the recording of critical incidents due to the fact that you can take these mobile devices with you as easily as a notepad and record your CI’s where you want (e.g. in a cafeteria). Therefore, the usability was one of the key elements in this project. To reach this goal the authors created a clickable mock-up, which was used to test the functionality with future end-users. On the basis of the results of the mock-up and the usability tests, the authors developed a final prototype based on the web technology HTML5.