An important part of the MERS-TM interpretation process is to recognize when to move beyond monitoring and consider further action on the events with the lower risk indices. One way to accomplish this is to set an organizational threshold for these events to determine when events with low risk indices should be considered for further action steps.

Consider the following example:

After an event with a low risk index is entered into the database, a report from HAWK alerts the QA SysOp that there are 10 similar events in the database over the last six months and none have had a root cause analysis.

Although the potential risk of the new event is low, it is decided that correcting the same error over and over is requiring an excessive amount of resources; therefore, the QA SysOp changes the investigation decision to "expanded," and performs a root cause analysis.