Near-misses are your best source of safety intelligence
Adverse events are the tip of the iceberg. For every patient harm event, there are 10 to 300 near-misses — process failures that were caught before reaching the patient, or that didn't happen to cause harm this time.
Near-misses reveal the same systemic weaknesses as adverse events, without the patient harm. They're your early warning system — the smoke before the fire. But near-misses are also the events most likely to go unreported, because 'nothing happened.'
When your safety data only includes events that caused harm, you're missing the vast majority of your learning opportunities. You're waiting for patients to be hurt before you fix the processes that hurt them.
How ImprovementFlow addresses this
GoodCatch is literally named for this concept — catching process problems before they cause harm. The system is designed to make near-miss reporting as natural as reporting an adverse event, with the same simple submission flow and the same follow-through.
Frictionless reporting is critical for near-misses specifically because the motivation to report is lower. Nobody skips reporting a serious adverse event, but a near-miss? If it takes 10 minutes, most staff will let it go. GoodCatch makes it take 60 seconds.
Process reliability analysis then connects the dots between near-misses that look unrelated individually but reveal a systemic pattern when viewed together. That's where the real safety intelligence lives.
At UNC Health Care, over 5,000 GoodCatch reports were reviewed with pre-emptive actions taken — the vast majority were near-misses and process concerns that would never have surfaced in a traditional adverse-event-only reporting system.
Start with what you need today
Most customers begin with safety reporting or huddle boards and expand from there. No enterprise commitment required.