2024 Pennsylvania Patient Safety Reporting: Updated Rates for Acute Care Event Reports

Shawn Kepner, MS, Patient Safety Authority

ORCID iD 

Shawn Kepner (shawkepner@pa.gov) is a data scientist at the Patient Safety Authority.

Introduction

In the patient safety trends article published on April 21, 2025,1 reporting rates for 2024 were calculated based on data from the first half of the year, as data for Q3 and Q4 were not available as of the publication date. This brief update provides the final rates for 2024 using all quarters of data and compares them to the 2024 rates based on Q1 and Q2 as well as rates for prior years.

Methods

This analysis was performed using data extracted from the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Reporting System (PA-PSRS)[1] on June 30, 2025, and data obtained from the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council (PHC4)[2] on June 9, 2025. Rates are calculated as the number of reports of events occurring in a given time frame per 1,000 patient days for hospitals and per 1,000 surgical encounters for ambulatory surgical facilities (ASFs). Since rates are based on the event occurrence date, and not submission date, some rates in this brief update are slightly different than previously published rates. This is due to reports for events that occurred in prior periods being submitted after the original data extraction dates. To determine whether a significant trend exists over time, simple linear regression analyses were used with a level of significance of α=0.05.

Results

Figure 1 shows rates by year from 2014 through 2024. With the addition of Q3 and Q4 data, the final hospital rate for 2024 increased by 0.2 points compared to the rate using only Q1 and Q2. The 2024 hospital rate of 32.4 represents the second increase since 2019 and has rebounded to a level comparable to 2020. For ASFs, the final rate for 2024 stayed the same as the rate using only Q1 and Q2. The 2024 ASF rate of 11.4 continued a significant upward trend (R2=0.92, F(1,9)=110.78, p < 0.0001) from 2014 through 2024. The accompanying bar charts in Figure 1 show rates for each of the four quarters of 2024 for hospitals and ASFs and show why 2024 final rates have values close to the rates based on Q1 and Q2 only.