PRISMA stands for Prevention and Recovery Information System for Monitoring and Analysis. The system was developed by Tjerk van der Schaaf of the Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

PRISMA consists of a set of tools to monitor and analyze events and their consequences on safety, reliability, quality, and the environment. Originally developed to manage human error in the chemical process industry, it is now being applied in the steel industry, energy production, and hospitals.

The initial focus on safety consequences has been extended to provide an integral approach to manage all adverse consequences, based on the assumption that a common set of causal factors is responsible for these various effects.

The main goal is to build a quantitative database of events from which conclusions may be drawn to suggest optimal countermeasures to the responsible managers. These countermeasures may be directed not only at prevention of errors and faults, but also at promotion of recovery factors to ensure timely corrective action. As such, PRISMA often uses not only actual but rare "accidents" as inputs, but also (the abundantly available) near misses.

(Taken from PRISMA: a risk management tool based on incident analysis. A report to the Faculty of Technology Management, Eindhoven University, November 1995)