3 hours ago 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. Health IT and Patient Safety is both comprehensive and specific in terms of recommended … >> Go To The Portal
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.
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.
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. It states that care should be:
This call to action has led to a number of efforts to reduce errors and provide safe and effective health care. Information technology (IT) has been identified as a way to enhance the safety and effectiveness of care.
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.
Quality healthcare means doing the right thing — for the right patient, at the right time, in the right way — to achieve the best possible results. Patient safety practices protect patients from accidental or preventable harm associated with healthcare services.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Examples of CDS tools in EHRs include: Health maintenance reminders.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Since the 2011 IOM report, additional studies have reported problems in the usability and effectiveness of CDS, particularly concerning alert fatigue and overrides.(82-92) Alert fatigue occurs when a provider, after receiving too many alerts or reminders (some or many of which may be irrelevant to that provider), overrides or ignores further alerts without attending to them , which can decrease the care improvements expected from the tools and pose patient safety risks.
Interoperability is the ability of different information technology systems and software applications to communicate, exchange data, and use the information that has been exchanged.( 44) Growing evidence shows that interoperable health information exchange (HIE) has value to stakeholders and can improve care quality, efficiency, and safety by improving the timeliness and completeness of important patient health information such as medical test results, medications, diagnoses, preventive care measures, and allergies.(45-50) Improving interoperability has been identified as one of the top health IT safety priorities.(51-53)
The International Standards Organization (ISO) defines usability as “the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use .”(23) Others define usability in more granular ways for EHRs, specifying multiple design principles that result in more usable systems.(24, 25)