Anesthesia Quality May Be Improved Through Mandatory Reporting of Intraoperative Adverse Events

Introduction: Major anesthetic complications coded in the hospital discharge records of surgical patients are uncommon (≈ 0.9/1000 discharges).1 However, little is known about the prevalence of intraoperative complications that may not be serious enough to be reported at discharge. We previously described the development of a process within our anesthesia information management system (AIMS) to record intraoperative adverse events (AEs).2 We report on the prevalence of intraoperative AEs noted over the 2 years that our process has been in place.