Enrolled Bill Summary

            House Bill 1614 amends the Health and Safety Code to require the Texas Department of Health to establish an information clearinghouse concerning best practices for patient safety programs for hospitals, ambulatory surgical centers, and mental hospitals. The bill requires each facility: (1) to submit an annual report to the department that lists the number of occurrences of medication errors that result in death or serious permanent injury, perinatal deaths, suicides, abductions of newborn infants, sexual assaults, hemolytic transfusion reactions, surgical procedures performed on the wrong patient or wrong body part of a patient, and other events; (2) to identify factors leading to such events; (3) to develop plans to reduce the risk of similar events occurring in the future; and (4) to provide to the department at least one report of the best practices and safety measures related to each reported event. The bill requires the department to compile and make available to the public annual summaries of the information reported by each facility in a manner that does not identify specific hospitals or centers. House Bill 1614 provides that all information obtained by or required to be compiled by the department or a facility is confidential and subject to absolute privilege, not subject to legal compulsion, and prohibited from use as evidence in any civil, criminal, or administrative proceeding.