Dive Brief:
- The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) has released a Health IT Safety Roadmap to address medical errors and adverse effects.
- According to the agency, "safety organizations and researchers, health IT users and other stakeholders have found risks and hazards to patient safety associated with these systems and the complex environments in which they are implemented and used."
- A national Health IT Safety Center is also in the works, with two main goals: improving the safety of health IT and using health IT to make care safer, according to ONC.
Dive Insight:
A 2000 Institute of Medicine study estimated 44,000 to 98,000 people die in U.S. hospitals every year due to preventable medical errors. Studies have also shown that advanced medical records can reduce patient safety events. A 2014 study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon found a 27% decline in such events, with declines also in these two subcategories: 30% decline in events due to medication errors and 25% decline in events due to complications.
RTI International will be creating a task force of clinicians, patient advocates and safety experts to address the Safety Center's goals, with hopes that it establishes a culture of safety across the healthcare industry. ONC also foresees the Center as a "national learning system that enables health IT and its users to generate better and safer patient care outcomes." Areas of focus include improved data sharing related to safety events and hazards, better evidence-based reporting on health IT safety and more education of the safe use of health IT.
"As we focus on making our healthcare ecosystem interoperable and building a continually improving learning health system, we need to ensure health IT enables safe, high-quality care," Dr. Andrew Gettinger, chief medical officer at ONC, wrote in a blog.