health it and patient safety report

In virtually every report on patient safety summarized above, health IT has been identified as a critical tool to both measure and improve patient safety. Yet despite the possibility that health IT can enhance the safety and effectiveness of care, the widespread adoption and safe use of health IT products is still relatively immature.

Full Answer

How can healthcare information technology improve patient safety?

Health information technology (HIT) has the potential to improve patient safety by facilitating evidence-based decision making, minimizing error due to human factors, such as illegible handwriting and imprecise recollection of dosing recommendations, and enhancing the reporting, tracking, and aggregation of patient data.[1],[2],[3]

What is the purpose of the book @Health IT and patient safety?

Health IT and Patient Safetymakes recommendations for developing a framework for patient safety and health IT. This book focuses on finding ways to mitigate the risks of health IT-assisted care and identifies areas of concern so that the nation is in a better position to realize the potential benefits of health IT.

Why is patient safety important in healthcare?

Patient safety practices protect patients from accidental or preventable harm associated with healthcare services. Together, care quality and patient safety improvement activities can help healthcare teams achieve the 6 aims described in the Institute of Medicine’s publication Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century.

What is patient safety and how does an EHR improve it?

Patient safety refers to freedom from accidental or preventable injuries associated with health care services, and an electronic health record (EHR) system provides tools to help clinicians improve patient safety.

What is a patient safety report?

Patient Safety Reporting (PSR) gives military treatment facility personnel the ability to anonymously report medical events that impact the safety of patients.

What are 5 safety concerns in healthcare?

Patient safety issues and concernsMedication/drug errors. ... Healthcare-associated infections. ... Surgical errors and postoperative complications. ... Diagnostic errors. ... Laboratory/blood testing errors. ... Fall injuries. ... Communication errors. ... Patient identification errors.

What is a patient safety checklist?

Patient safety checklists are visual tools to prompt safe practices, standardize communication, and ensure no step is forgotten before or during a medical procedure1.

What are the 6 patient safety goals?

The Joint Commission has outlined seven patient safety goals for hospitals to focus on in 2021, including:Identify patients correctly. ... Improve staff communication. ... Use medicines safely. ... Use alarms safely. ... Prevent infection. ... Identify patient safety risks. ... Prevent mistakes in surgery.

What are examples of patient safety?

The Nurse's Role in Patient SafetyIdentify “wrong site, wrong procedure, wrong patient” errors. High quality hospitals view nurses as the physician's partner in avoiding errors such as these. ... Catch medication mistakes. ... Educate patients about their medications. ... Reduce patient falls. ... Monitor patients for deterioration.

How do you ensure patient safety?

5 Factors that can help improve patient safety in hospitalsUse monitoring technology. ... Make sure patients understand their treatment. ... Verify all medical procedures. ... Follow proper handwashing procedures. ... Promote a team atmosphere.

What are the types of checklist?

Here are five types of checklists you can use to make your workplace safer and more efficient:To-do Checklists. This is the most common type of checklist. ... Training Checklists. ... Task Checklist. ... Troubleshooting Checklist. ... Coordination Checklists.

What is patient safety in healthcare?

What is Patient Safety? Patient Safety is a health care discipline that emerged with the evolving complexity in health care systems and the resulting rise of patient harm in health care facilities. It aims to prevent and reduce risks, errors and harm that occur to patients during provision of health care.

What is a checklist in assessment?

A checklist is the least complex form of scoring that examines the presence or absence of specific elements in the product of a performance. All elements are generally weighted the same and the gradations in quality are typically not recognized.

How do you identify patient safety risks?

A number of research approaches can be used at stage 1 to identify risks and hazards including the use of medical records and administrative record review, event reporting, direct observation, process mapping, focus groups, probabilistic risk assessment, and safety culture assessment.

What are the 2021 National Patient Safety Goals?

The Joint Commission's 2021 national patient safety goals for hospitals are:Improve the accuracy of patient identification.Improve staff communication.Improve the safety of medication administration.Reduce patient harm associated with clinical alarm systems.Reduce the risk of healthcare-associated infections.More items...•

How many patient safety indicators are there?

26 indicatorsThe Patient Safety Indicators (PSIs) are a set of 26 indicators (including 18 provider-level indicators) developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to provide information on safety-related adverse events occurring in hospitals following operations, procedures, and childbirth.

How does health IT help patients?

HHS is working to address these risks through several Affordable Care Act initiatives including the Partnership for Patients and accountable care organizations. Health IT will help make these patient safety programs and others like it work by providing health care professionals and patients with the real-time information they need to avoid injury and death.

What is the IOM report?

The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) appreciates the thoughtful work of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in its new report, Health IT and Patient Safety: Building Safer Systems for Better Care.

What is the HITECH Act?

HITECH Act, Health IT, and Patient Safety. HHS has already initiated several activities under the HITECH Act to ensure that any safety issues that arise in the national adoption of EHRs are shared and addressed. The Secretary has appointed a technical expert panel focused on improving safety that regularly meets and reports its findings.

Why is patient identification important?

Patient identification is essential to patient safety. Patient identification is essential to patient safety, and you can’t achieve either if you don’t have accurate demographic data in the patient record. Today’s healthcare settings usually handle high patient volume.

What is SAFER on an EHR?

The ONC Safety Assurance Factors for EHR Resilience (SAFER) Guides recommendations illustrate what you need to do to achieve safe and effective EHR implementation and use. The recommendations should be considered proactive risk assessments that aim to mitigate and minimize EHR-related safety hazards. Each SAFER Guide consists of between 10 to 25 recommended practices that can be assessed as “fully implemented,” “partially implemented,” or “not implemented.” Implementing recommended practices helps you ensure safe use of the EHR.

How does EHR help in population health?

EHR and population health. EHR systems also play a role in improving population health. They process large amounts of aggregate health data and can support both trend and outlier analysis. This lets clinicians and public health professionals take action to improve outcomes.

What is an EHR in clinical practice?

Clinicians can use automated EHRs to harvest performance measurements from data routinely captured in the course of care. We refer to electronic clinical quality measures (specified in standard format for automatable, interoperable electronic reporting from the EHR) as eCQMs.

What is an EHR?

A properly implemented EHR helps clinicians more easily track patients from one point of care to another and document all care they receive. It also has automated functionalities that improve patient care and safety, such as: Electronic prescribing. Drug-drug interaction checks. Drug-allergy interaction checks.

What is CDS in EHR?

EHR systems also offer integrated best-practice support in the form of electronic clinical decision support (CDS). CDS gives care teams general and person-specific information — intelligently filtered and organized — at the appropriate times.

Why is planning important in EHR?

Planning is essential to get the most out of your EHR investment and to ensure its safe use. The resources provided throughout this playbook provide clinicians with a starting place to use their EHR to improve care quality and safety.

What is health IT?

Health IT, when well designed and implemented, is a tool that can help health information flow in ways that allow for improvements in patient health and safety. Whatever the drawbacks to health IT systems, the evidence suggests that health IT has raised the floor on safety.

Does advanced health IT improve surgical safety?

One recent study also showed health IT has improved surgical safety.

Is health IT a silver bullet?

Health IT is not and never will be a “silver bullet” that reduces unsafe conditions, errors, and adverse events. To improve safety and quality, health IT is an important part of delivery system reform and redesigned systems of care. Health IT, when well designed and implemented, is a tool that can help health information flow in ways ...

Does health IT improve patient safety?

Since then, whether health IT actually improves patient safety has remained an open question. The nation has seen widespread adoption of health IT as a result of the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs. With that increase in adoption, there should be more and better evidence on the actual impact of health IT on safety.

How does health information technology improve patient safety?

Health information technology (HIT) has the potential to improve patient safety by facilitating evidence-based decision making, minimizing error due to human factors, such as illegible handwriting and imprecise recollection of dosing recommendations, and enhancing the reporting, tracking, and aggregation of patient data .[1],[2],[3]

When was the AHRQ report published?

Published May 30, 2019. Accessed January 23, 2020. This project was funded under contract number 75Q80119C00004 from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The authors are solely responsible for this report’s contents, findings, and conclusions, which do not necessarily represent ...

Why is barcoding important in nursing?

One featured approach is the use of barcoding and scanning protocols in the medication delivery process to reduce the risk of ADEs. Several articles recommended barcoding in perioperative care and the operating room settings as risk reduction strategies to prevent medication administration errors. In addition to these examples, barcode scanning nursing protocols may have the potential to reduce the risk of wrong-patient insulin pen errors.

How does CPOE help with medication errors?

The results of a systematic review concluded that the use of CPOE reduces the overall medication error rate as well as specific error rates for wrong dose, wrong drug, administration frequency, administration route, and drug-to-drug interaction errors. However, the implementation of CPOE can introduce new types of errors and may not prevent errors that are not rule-based, such as technical or memory errors. CPOE and continued pharmacist review are both essential for more comprehensive error prevention.

What is AI in healthcare?

In 2019, PSNet included multiple resources that identified artificial intelligence (AI) systems as a rapidly emerging healthcare technology with the potential to improve diagnostics. Specific examples highlight the use of AI in pediatric diseases.

Is barcoding a human error?

Barcoding can alleviate the risk of labeling errors in transfusions by reducing the potential for human error in the validation processes. One 2019 article demonstrated that barcoding, in conjunction with an electronic auditing system, was safer than a manual verification system for transfusions in the operating room .

What are the health-IT related safety concerns found in incident reports and claims data?

The numerous health-IT related safety concerns found in incident reports and claims data are remarkably diverse . A survey of members of the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management and the American Health Lawyer’s Association revealed eight similarly broad issues demanding attention in no particular priority order:(22)

What is the evidence on health IT safety and interventions?

This Report of the Evidence on Health IT Safety and Interventions is intended to summarize recent evidence in this rapidly expanding field, to identify areas where research is needed, and to encourage the development or refinement of existing tools or interventions to enhance the safety and increase the safe use of health IT. This report has been constructed with a view that, in the event stakeholders find sufficient value in this report, it could serve as the foundation of a series of evidence summaries that update its findings regularly or that delve more deeply into specific areas than is feasible in this initial, broad survey.

What is a health IT safety partnership?

Designed as a multistakeholder collaboration that began in 2013, this Partnership provides a common place where providers, health IT developers, PSOs, safety researchers, insurers, patient advocates, and others to gather, identify pressing health IT safety issues, and jointly develop solutions to those issues. The first issues include developing safe practices for copy-and-paste functions in EHRs and for patient identification in these systems. The Partnership convenes quarterly meetings and invites participants from the public and private sectors. In addition, it will offer public access to health IT safety solutions and best practices developed by the Partnership as these resources become available. To access the Partnership, go to:

What is a patient identification guide?

Patient Identification SAFER Guide Identifies recommended safety practices for identification of patients in the EHR, to ensure that the information presented by and entered into the EHR matches the correct person

What is the most common system-related factor in all adverse events?

Communication breakdowns are the most common system-related factor in all adverse events, and EHR systems are rapidly replacing face-to-face communication as the default way health care providers exchange information and discuss problems and plans. How well EHRs function in enabling communication is a critical safety concern.

What is the Joint Commission's first patient safety goal?

Providing care to the wrong patient is a longstanding concern in patient safety, prompted The Joint Commission’s very first Patient Safety Goal: “Improve the safety of patient identification.” Recently, better ways to measure the incidence of the problem have been identified, and research has begun to clarify why these errors happen and how they can be prevented.

What are the risks of recently discharged patients?

Roughly one in five recently discharged patients experiences an adverse drug event,(75) and these patients are also at risk for diagnostic error. Follow-up is deficient on 20–61 percent of laboratory tests pending at discharge(76), including cancer-related biopsy results, a variety of actionable microbiology results, and other critical findings, such as abnormal lead levels. Automated alerts(77), emails(78), and improved electronic discharge summaries(79, 80) are some of the interventions being tested to improve communication about pending results.