The Northwest Safety & Quality Patient Safety Organization (NWSQ PSO) named diagnostic safety as a key area of focus and encourages health care groups to use data early to spot risks, recognize trends, and prevent harm before it happens. This approach aligns with the growing use of AI, data tools and digital health technology to boost patient safety.
AI is emerging as both a powerful safety tool and a potential safety risk. Health care organizations are using AI to detect patient deterioration, improve medication safety monitoring, enhance event reporting and strengthen risk prediction.
AHRQ-supported research continues to explore how AI, machine learning and digital tools can improve quality and patient safety.
New technologies also mean new risks. Automation bias, overreliance on AI, model inaccuracies and integration hurdles could contribute to patient harm, experts say.
For instance, AI scribes can ease documentation burden and allow clinicians to focus on patients – but add risk around note accuracy, missing clinical information, reasoning errors and inadequate clinician review.
Diagnostic safety is a priority across the country. According to AHRQ, an estimated 795,000 Americans experience permanent disability or death each year due to misdiagnosis-related harms. Researchers are increasingly studying electronic trigger tools, AI-assisted clinical decision support, EHR-based diagnostic surveillance, and patient engagement technologies to reduce missed, delayed, and incorrect diagnoses.
The NWSQ PSO helps navigate this new landscape through learning, benchmarking, analysis and collaboration. By learning from adverse events and near misses, participants can spot new risks, address vulnerabilities, and make improvements before similar events occur locally.
Health care is in the middle of a digital transformation, and it is clear organizations cannot depend on technology alone to improve safety. Success needs strong governance, clinician engagement, workflow integration, training and monitoring. Safer care means combining technology with human expertise, ensuring AI enhances, rather than replaces, clinical judgment.
Through reporting, data and collaborative learning, NWSQ PSO participants strengthen safety culture, support High Reliability principles and advance safer care for patients, families and health care teams.
For additional patient safety information, please review the Northwest Safety and Quality PSO Patient Safety Trend Report Vol 1 May 2026
For more information and to get involved, contact: [email protected] (Kimberly Parrish)