Assessing the Effectiveness of MEDCOM Form 741D

There are thousands of preventable deaths annually due to medical errors in the United States. There has been a major emphasis in the medical field to reduce human errors and for medical facilities to become High Reliability Organizations (HRO). Even if not fatal, human error can lead to mistrust within any industry whether it be a car repair shop, a hospital or a dental clinic. Within the Military Health System (MHS), Patient Safety Reports (PSRs) are used to track a large variety of errors and serve as a gauge for the reliability of the Armys dental health care system. Sentinel events (SEs) are a subset of PSRs; these are events that have caused harm to the patient and or the staff. The purpose of this study was to compare the number of SEs reported from 2015-2016, to the number of SEs reported from2018-2019 in order to determine the effectiveness of MEDCOM (US Army Medical Command) Form 741D (commonly known as the dental timeout form). MEDCOM Form741D has been mandated for use in all irreversible procedures in the Army Dental Corps since its introduction in 2017. The null hypothesis for this project was that there would be no statistically significant difference in the number of SEs from 2015-2016 as compared to 2018-2019.