Developing a user-centered voluntary medical incident reporting system.

Medical errors are one of leading causes of death among adults in the United States. According to the Institute of Medicine, reporting of medical incidents could be a cornerstone to learn from errors and to improve patient safety, if incident data are collected in a properly structured format which is useful for the detection of patterns, discovery of underlying factors, and generation of solutions. Globally, a number of medical incident reporting systems were deployed for collecting observable incident data in care delivery organizations (CDO) over the past several years. However, few researches delved into design of user-centered reporting system for improving completeness and accuracy of medical incident collection, let alone design models created for other institutes to follow. In this paper, we introduce the problems identified in a current using voluntary reporting system and our effort is being made towards complete, accurate and useful user-centered new reporting system through a usability engineering process.