patient safety and health information technology
Committee on Patient Safety and Quality Improvement
Committee on Practice Management
This document displays rising ideas on patient protection and is concern to exchange. The records should no longer be construed as dictating an special course of remedy or system to be followed.
ABSTRACT: The advantages of health data era (IT) include facilitating communique among fitness care companies; improving medicinal drug protection, tracking, and reporting; and promoting first-class of care through optimized access to and adherence to recommendations. Health IT systems allow the collection of statistics to be used for best management, final results reporting, and public health sickness surveillance and reporting. However, development is needed with all health IT, specifically regarding layout, implementation, and integration between structures in the paintings environment. Robust interoperability is important for safe care, however this intention has proved elusive. Significant patient protection concerns already have been diagnosed; it's far essential to keep patient safety and quality as the primary awareness
Benefits of Health Information Technology
Most obstetrician–gynecologists are actually the use of electronic fitness information. They have rapidly moved into use because of the recognition in their capacity blessings and authorities applications that incentivize their use. The blessings of fitness information technology (IT) include its ability to keep and retrieve records; the ability to unexpectedly speak patient records in a legible layout; improved remedy protection thru elevated legibility, which doubtlessly decreases the hazard of drugs mistakes; and the ease of retrieval of affected person statistics.
The capability to enhance affected person safety exists thru the use of medicine indicators, medical flags and reminders, higher monitoring and reporting of consultations and diagnostic checking out, medical decision support, and the supply of whole patient data. Data accrued thru using fitness IT can be used to assess the efficacy of therapeutic interventions and have been demonstrated to cause enhancements inside the practice of drugs 1. Alerts can optimize adherence to recommendations and proof-based totally care 2. Record uniformity may be designed to lessen exercise versions, behavior systematic audits for first-rate warranty, and optimize evidenced-based take care of commonplace situations three.
Health IT is growing affected person engagement as consumers of fitness care. It allows patients get right of entry to to their scientific facts, which helps them to sense extra knowledgeable about their conditions and encourages them to actively take part in shared decision making.
Outside the patient come upon, it can improve comply with-up for ignored appointments, consultations, and diagnostic checking out. A health care company can look for specific cohorts of patients within a practice to reveal and improve adherence to indicated fitness care which includes mammograms, Pap checks, or size of hemoglobin A1c degrees.
Patient Safety Concerns With Health Information Technology
In the 2013 list of risks through ECRI Institute, four of the top ten hazards have been without delay related to fitness IT. “Technology-associated negative occasions can be related to all components of a comprehensive era machine and can contain mistakes of either fee or omission. These accidental detrimental occasions commonly stem from human-machine interfaces or employer/system layout” four.
The use of indicators to warn fitness care providers of possible problems is a powerful tool. However, indicators pinnacle the list of 2013 health IT dangers because the sheer extent of them is inflicting alert fatigue. This issue is complicated and calls for individualization inside every facility. Developing structures to control indicators, set up stages of importance, and cause them to unambiguous is a important patient protection precedence
