In health care settings, for example, tracking and trending the number of medication errors may help identify a single provider who is responsible for the majority of such errors. Similarly, tracking and trends crime data by type, time and location can likewise help identify patterns that can help formulate effective law enforcement responses. For this purpose, many law enforcement agencies and health care organizations are turning to specialized incident reporting software, but the same type of results can be obtained through manual recordation (albeit with more work) as long as care is given to the accuracy of the above-mentioned details. In addition, some practitioners have used existing software tools such as Lotus Notes or Excel to develop their own customized incident reporting programs (Brenner & Freundlich, 2006). For example, one customized incident report program is based in Lotus Notes and "uses e-mail to route incident reports from direct service staff to supervisors and administrators, facilitates timely clinical oversight and risk management and ensures the security of clients' protected health information" (Brenner & Freundlich, 2006, p. 612). .
In fact, most authorities agree that computer-based tracking is the only truly effective method of tracking incident reports, particularly in larger organizations. In this regard, Berntsen (2004) reports that, "Some hospitals still use handwritten incident reports, which are labor-intensive to read and interpret. As information databases improve, hospitals will most likely improve their ability to track alarming trends. Currently, such trends may be lost amid the volume of handwritten paperwork" (p. 44). Further, compliance with national and international health care accrediting agencies frequently requires the use of automated incident reporting programs (Brenner & Freundlich, 2006).
Logs.
Logs consist of a series of entries in a record in a temporally linear fashion that describes all types of specified occurrences.