Which organization tracks sentinel events in a database to ensure they are adequately analyzed and unsafe processes are resolved?

• A. The Joint Commission
• B. Food and Drug Administration
• C. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
• D. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services

Answer: (A)

Sentinel events are serious safety incidents, such as deaths or significant harm, that signal the need for immediate investigation and corrective action. Tracking these events in a centralized database allows organizations to learn from failures, conduct root cause analyses, and implement system-level changes to prevent recurrence. The Joint Commission maintains the Sentinel Event Database, collecting reports from accredited healthcare organizations and using the analyses to identify patterns and drive safety improvements across the system. The other agencies focus on different areas—FDA on drug and device safety through reports like MedWatch, CDC on public health surveillance, and CMS on payer and quality programs—so they don’t maintain a sentinel event database for hospital process failures.