Betsy Lehman Center pushes state pilot to detect hospital patient harm in near real time

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.