Betsy Lehman Center pushes state pilot to detect hospital patient harm in near real time
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Summary
The Betsy Lehman Center requested funding to pilot automated adverse-event monitoring in 6—to 8 Massachusetts hospitals. The center projects the 18-month pilot could prevent thousands of harms and generate multimillion-dollar savings to payers including MassHealth.
Barbara Fain, executive director of the Betsy Lehman Center for Patient Safety, urged the committee to fund an 18-month pilot of automated adverse-event monitoring that would scan hospital electronic health records to detect likely harm events and deliver near-real-time reports.
Fain said modern algorithms and centralized validation teams can reliably detect many categories of patient harm and that early-adopter hospitals outside Massachusetts have reported 10 times the number of events they previously recognized and sustained reductions in harm of 25% or more. "This approach can reliably detect well over 100 types of harm in near real time," Fain told the committee.
The center has procured a vendor and designed a statewide pilot. Its FY27 request includes $1.6 million to continue pilot implementation (part of a total estimated pilot cost of $3.5 million). Fain estimated the pilot could prevent roughly 4,500 harm events and produce an estimated $54 million in payer savings during the pilot period, about $11 million of which would be MassHealth savings.
Lawmakers asked for technical details; Fain said the center has a research and evaluation plan and will report pilot outcomes, including clinical impact and net fiscal effects, to the legislature.
If funded and scaled, the center argued, near-real-time harm detection could reduce inpatient length of stay and relieve capacity pressures that contribute to ED boarding.
