Creating a common vision for all stakeholders to make healthcare safer with interactive visual modelling

Medical errors are a major cause of harm to patients. The World Health Organization has, therefore, formed an Alliance for Patient Safety. Reports on error are a rich source for understanding of causes, cascades and consequences. Improvements in safety can result through lessons learnt from these. There are loud and clear calls for the development of appropriate error reporting and taxonomy systems, that are useful at the point of care and policy levels. The urgency expressed in these calls presents a challenge and an opportunity to harness the power of computer visualisation that can help structure and illustrate the 'story' of an error in a universal language. This can overcome the shortcomings of current reporting methods and help create an unambiguous international error taxonomy. Presented here is a concept for a web-based visual error reporting system. Although the ambulatory care domain is used for illustration, this concept can provide a user-friendly, efficient means of reporting errors in any domain of healthcare. This unambiguous structured visual modelling, aided by touch-screen technology, is useful to all members of healthcare teams, especially policymakers and patients. Patients particularly are a major source of knowledge on the state of safety in all healthcare settings that is waiting to be tapped.