Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Patient Safety Indicators and Mortality in Surgical Patients

Patient safety indicators (PSI), developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, use administrative billing data to measure and compare patient safety events at medical centers. We retrospectively examined whether PSIs accurately reflect patients' risk of mortality, hospital length of stay, and intensive care unit (ICU) requirements at an academic medical center. Surgical patient records with PSIs were reviewed between October 2011 and September 2012 at our urban academic medical center. Primary outcomes studied included mortality, hospital length of stay, and ICU requirements. Subset analysis was performed for each PSI and its association with the outcome measures. PSIs were more common among surgical patients who died as compared with those alive at discharge (35.3 vs 2.7 PSIs/100 patients, P < 0.01). Although patients who died with PSIs had shorter hospital courses, they had a significantly greater ICU requirement than those without a PSI (96.0 vs 61.1%, P < 0.01) and patients who were alive at discharge (96.0 vs 48.0%, P < 0.01). The most frequently associated PSIs with mortality were postoperative metabolic derangements (41.7%), postoperative sepsis (38.5%), and pressure ulcers (33.3%). PSIs occur at a higher frequency in surgical patients who die and are associated with increased ICU requirements.