Bob Wachter’s post on incident reports about medical errors and near-misses would be a funny unintended-consequences story if the health care industry could afford to waste money and time on patient safety.

When I visit hospitals to talk about patient safety, they often show me their IR reporting trends. If the number of IRs has gone up over the past year, they breathlessly proclaim, “This is great. We’ve succeeded in creating a reporting culture – the front line personnel believe that we take errors seriously. We’re getting safer!”

That would sound more credible if hospitals with downward trends didn’t invariably shout, “This is great, we have fewer errors! Our efforts are paying off!”