Visual modeling for making healthcare safer

Medical errors are a major cause of harm to patients. World Health Organization has formed an Alliance for Patient Safety. Improvements in safety can result through lessons learnt from error reports. These are a rich source for understanding of causes, cascades and consequences of errors. Calls for the development of appropriate error reporting and taxonomy systems that are useful at the point of care and policy levels are loud and clear. The urgency expressed in these calls presents a challenge and an opportunity to harness the power of computer visualization 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 web-based visual error reporting system. Although 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 modeling is useful to all members of the health-care teams (including patients) at the point of care, as well as to policymakers.