The presence of many similar events may also influence the decision to conduct an expanded investigation.

For example, it may be determined that an event presents low risk to the patient and to the organization and therefore doesn't seem to warrant an expanded investigation. However, the fact that many similar events have previously taken place may indicate a problem worthy of attention and may, in fact, call for further investigation in spite of the event's individual risk index.

To find similarities among events already in the database, MERS-TM uses event comparison software, which is presented in the Computation path of this lesson.

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