Dive Brief:
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In its “Patient Safety in Healthcare, Forecast to 2022,” Frost & Sullivan predicts that patient safety will become a core value proposition for care providers over the next four years.
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The report said the six biggest patient safety adverse events, as well as the greatest opportunities for investment, are: medication safety, antibiotic resistance, patient diagnostics safety, sepsis, cyber-security of medical devices and patient data privacy and unnecessary emergency department admissions.
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The report authors also suggested remote healthcare technologies, including the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) and increased healthcare data exchanges will lead to higher cybersecurity risks, including compromised protected health information and medical device/implant data breaches.
Dive Insight:
The report assessed the 30 “most pressing safety adverse events affecting patients, caregivers and healthcare organizations.” The adverse episodes affected 91.8 million patient admissions in the U.S. and Western Europe, which resulted in about 1.95 million deaths. The report predicted that adverse patient safety events in the U.S. and Western Europe will result in about $383.7 billion in healthcare costs over the next four years.
“Up to 17 percent of all hospitalizations are affected by one or more adverse events and around 15% of hospital expenditures is attributable to addressing them. The fact that 30 to 70 percent of these are potentially avoidable makes it imperative to prevent them from happening,” Anuj Agarwal, transformational healthcare senior research analyst at Frost & Sullivan, said.
Agarwal suggested care providers and market participants should target “low-penetration areas with significant disruptive potential like antibiotic resistance, cybersecurity, avoidable ED admissions, pressure ulcers and sepsis.”
The report suggests that incentives for increased attention to patient safety will grow, including the industry moving to a value-based model, advancements in medical, surgical and patient care technologies, data integration in the areas of analytics, remote monitoring and surveillance, data interoperability and predictive analytics and newer technologies, such as blockchain, artificial intelligence and wearables.
The report said the industry already addresses some adverse events, such as medication safety and hand hygiene non-compliance. Payers are also looking to reduce unnecessary ED admissions, including Anthem on the private side and Kentucky’s Medicaid program on the public side.
The report predicted growth in patient safety, but barriers may impede progress. “The lack of clarity on available business models, fragmented and isolated vendor solutions addressing a specific set of issues in a particular segment, and disagreement on ideal patient safety solutions and implementation costs are major hurdles currently facing the market,” Agarwal said.