ONC issues IT safety plan

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) has published a health IT patient safety plan that builds off of the Institute of Medicine's recommendations to more fully describe the role of health IT in terms of patient safety and to identify ways multiple stakeholders can work to use health IT to strengthen patient safety efforts.

Health IT can improve patient safety by reducing medication errors, by providing immediate access to patient records and offering tools to manage population health, according to the Dec. 21, 2012, document. However, health IT also creates the potential for risks and “health IT will only fulfill its enormous potential to improve patient safety if the risks associated with its use are identified, if there is a coordinated effort to mitigate those risks and if it is used to make care safer.”

There are two fundamental objectives of the health IT safety plan: to make care safer and to continuously improve the safety of health IT. One way in which health IT can improve healthcare safety is through clinical decision support (CDS), which can facilitate even simple tasks that should be, but aren’t always, performed routinely. Continuously improving health IT safety will require keeping tools, such as CDS and computerized provider order entry, up-to-date and clinically relevant.

Achieving the objectives of the health IT safety plan will require increasing the knowledge about health IT safety, targeting resources to improve health IT safety and promoting a culture of safety.

To accomplish these tasks, the report suggested that:

• It should be easier for clinicals to report patient safety issues using EHRs;
• Providers engage health IT developers to create a sense of shared responsibility;
• More support be given to patient safety organizations to identify, aggregate and analyze health IT safety issues;
• Data on health IT safety events be collected through the quality and safety review system;
• Patient safety be incorporated into certification criteria for health IT products;
• Health IT safety be incorporated into medical education and training; and
• State governments embark on their own initiatives to improve health IT safety;

The Department of Health and Human Services and its various offices, such as the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the FDA and ONC, already have engaged in efforts, such as  Meaningful Use, to improve the safety of health IT, but much more can be done, according to the report. “This plan builds upon and seeks to strengthen patient safety efforts across government programs and the private sector -- including patients, healthcare providers, technology companies and healthcare safety oversight bodies.”

ONC is accepting public comment on the health IT safety plan through Feb. 4.