NQF report focuses on design, use, implementation of HIT for patient safety

The National Quality Forum (NQF) has issued a report providing guidance on how to measure the safety and safe use of health IT, including IT design, use and implementation.

At the same time that health IT is considered critical to accelerating widespread improvements in healthcare quality and the shift to value-based care, the use of such technology has introduced new patient safety challenges into the healthcare system. This includes design flaws that can result in the recording of inaccurate patient information, alert fatigue and flawed implementation strategies that may result in clinicians circumventing IT safety features.

“Identifying patient safety risks associated with use of health IT is foundational to reap the benefits of IT to improve patient care, and all healthcare and health IT stakeholders have a shared responsibility to address these risks,” said Hardeep Singh, MD, MPH, chief of the Health Policy, Quality & Informatics Program at the Center for Innovations in Quality, Effectiveness, and Safety, based at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center and Baylor College of Medicine, Houston. “Our recommendations prioritize risk areas and build a strong scientific foundation to advance measurement and improvement of patient safety in this area.”

The Committee recommended that measures to address the patient safety associated with the use of health IT consider the following high-level concepts:

• Safe health IT – To ensure that health IT is accessible and usable on demand by all members of a care team and that health IT data are complete, accurate, secure, and protected
• Using health IT safely – To ensure that features and functionality are effective, efficient, and implemented as intended; that there are structures, processes, and procedures in place to ensure safety and safe use of health IT; and that there are effective mechanisms to monitor, detect, and report on the safety and safe use of health IT
• Improving patient safety – To ensure health IT is leveraged to reduce patient harm and improve the safety of patient care and enables meaningful and effective patient engagement.

The report also notes the increasing importance of seamless information exchange, suggesting interoperability could be measured by assessing whether systems have the ability to communicate and exchange specific types of data and how often diagnostic test results are unavailable when needed.