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Bridget M. Kuehn

JAMA. 2005;294:1201.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

President Bush has signed into law legislation creating a national medical errors database.

Under the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005, physicians can voluntarily report medical errors to patient safety organizations. (Information about this legislation is available at http://thomas.loc.gov by searching under the bill number, S.544.enr.) The organizations would use the data to identify trends in medical errors and propose improvements.

The reports will not identify patients, health care professionals, or individuals who report the errors. They also cannot be used in lawsuits or by medical regulatory bodies for punitive action against those who report errors.

The Joint Commission of Health Care Organizations, which operates the database that compiles voluntary reports of medical errors, acknowledges that currently, only a small fraction of the errors that occur are reported. However, the agency’s president, Dennis S. O’Leary, MD, said the new law could boost reporting by making . . . [Full Text of this Article]