According to information presented at the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists Summer Meeting, health systems that rely primarily on voluntary reporting of adverse drug events identify as few as 6% of events." James M. Hoffman, PharmD, MS, BCPS, Medication Outcomes & Safety Officer, and Director, Medication-Use Safety Residency Program, and Associate Member in pharmaceutical sciences at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, TN, argued for using several different methods of detecting adverse events in order "to get a more complete understanding of opportunities to improve the medication use process … Underreporting is a key limitation of error reporting systems.” Hoffman proposed the use of four common methods: "incident reporting; direct observation; medical record review; and trigger tool." He also said that electronic health records can be "a key resource for event detection."
Adverse Event Generation Gap
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