Prescription For Patient Safety With Health IT: More Time With the Patient, and Less Distraction

By TOM LANG, MD Recent government incentives have gone a long way toward bringing digitization to healthcare, with  particular benefits seen in the PACS/ digital radiology areas and digitally archiving data for better access.  A 2016 AMA survey (1) has shown that the biggest desires for physicians from digital health are increasing patient safety and improving work efficiency. I would like to propose that the most important aspects of patient safety are as follows: clinical workers (that is, doctors, nurses and other members of the caregiving team) need to maximize their time ‘at the bedside’ clinical workers need to maximize their communication and interaction within the patient care team to optimize patient care clinical workers need to minimize distractions from the two activities above. Health IT systems need a complete overhaul, guided by these principles, in order to optimize patient safety with its use. One way to look at health IT from a clinical perspective is to break it down into 2 pieces: data aggregation (that is, the ‘anytime, anywhere access’ to digitized health information) and data entry: the time and distraction from patient care that data entry tasks require for clinical workers.  The big wins so far with health IT has been with the former, the big problems with the latter. Recent US government incentives have pushed healthcare systems and participants to buy and implement products that were already available in the market...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs