Adopting information technology into health care is one of the most promising solutions for reducing costs and improving patient safety at hospitals, but what happens when technology is the cause of a mistake that causes patient harm?
The Institute of Medicine wants to make sure that as hospitals rush to buy and implement health IT systems, those systems don’t become a cause of patient injuries.
“Just as the potential benefits of health IT are great, so are the possible harms to patient safety if these technologies are not being properly designed and used,” said Gail L. Warden, president emeritus of Henry Ford Health System and chair of the committee that wrote the IOM report. “To protect patients, industry and government have a shared responsibility to ensure greater transparency, accountability, and reporting of health IT-related medical errors.”
The agency called on the Health and Human Services department to publish a plan for mitigating patient risks related to the use of computer technology in health settings.
Among the mistakes that have been reported to the IOM are: medication dosing errors, failure to detect fatal illnesses, and treatment delays due to poor human-computer interactions or loss of data.
See Kaiser Health News’s story on the IOM report.
In reporting my Washingtonian article on patient safety, I spent some time with a doctor who showed me how health IT helped her with her job and how it can reduce patient error, so I hope that IT vendors move quickly to ensure the integrity of hospital IT systems.
