Some of the solutions proposed to make health IT safer for patients revolve around improving clinical documentation, health IT workflow, interoperability, and medication management in EHRs.
Five years after the Institute of Medicine concluded that the market has failed to keep patients safe with respect to potential safety hazards introduced by health IT, the HHS Office of the National Coordinator has published its first report surveying evidence of health IT safety concerns.
ONC, which commissioned the 2011 IOM report, includes with its report a survey of recommended corrective action from sources around healthcare and the healthcare IT industry.
The findings, described in an ONC blog post last Friday, aggregate health IT research conducted over the past several years by the AMA, AHIMA, AMIA, AHRQ, the VA, The Joint Commission, the National Quality Forum, academic journals, and HHS itself.
Some of the solutions proposed to make health IT safer for patients revolve around improving clinical documentation, health IT workflow, interoperability, and medication management aspects of electronic health records.
The findings are split into two major reports:
- Report of the Evidence on Health IT Safety and Interventions
- Goals and Priorities for Health Care Organizations to Improve Safety Using Health IT
Both were prepared for ONC by RTI International, a nonprofit research institute based in San Francisco.
In the evidence report, the most common reason cited for placing orders for the wrong patient was interruptions while writing the order.
Other contributing factors included incorrect entry of patient name or number, small font sizes, failure of one provider to exit the system before another logged on, and choosing the wrong patient from a list of patients.
The 2011 IOM report recommended that all health IT vendors be required to publicly register and list their products with the ONC.
It further suggested that ONC specify the quality and risk management process requirements which health IT vendors must adopt, focusing on human factors, a culture of safety, and usability of health IT products and technologies.
Last year, ONC released a five-year plan to create a federal Health IT Safety Center. Despite this detailed Obama administration proposal, Congress has yet to fund the creation of such a center.