IHI Global Trigger Tools (Second Edition)

The IHI recently released a document describing the concept of Global Trigger Tools to identify adverse events that are unreported through the usual voluntary event reporting systems.

The description of the document is here.

...or you can go directly to the document here. You may need to log in to the IHI website to download the document.

In my previous hospital, I was able create a monitoring system that would scan the EMR from the previous day to look for these events. If a person with limited SQL programming skills can do this (via an ODBC connection to the back-end tables of the EMR), you can be sure that EMR vendors in the future will be offering such a module (at a high cost no doubt!).

Having such a global trigger function in your organization via EMR is a great way to add a little more objectivity in what was a voluntary, subjective, and political function in the past.