This week in health IT: Safety first

If this week is any indication, health IT safety is going to be a primary focus in 2014.

When it comes to health IT and patient safety, “we need more and better research to know what to work on first,” said Kathy Kenyon, JD, senior policy analyst at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and moderator of a Jan. 10 webcast on the subject.

There is a low rate of voluntary reporting, she said, but one of the promises of health IT is that it can make reporting itself easier.

Incidents do not occur in isolation, said Cindy Wallace, senior risk management analyst for the ECRI Institute.

The top five health IT-related events, said Karen Zimmer, MD, medical director of patient safety, risk and quality for the ECRI Institute: system interface, wrong input, software issue/system configuration, wrong record retrieved and software issue/functionality.

“We’re trying to encourage a dialogue that is part of a commitment to making certain that this very powerful technology is used to make healthcare safer,” said Kenyon. “As long as people are blaming each other, it’s very hard to have the conversation.”

Meanwhile, the Department of Health & Human Services released a new set of guides and interactive tools this week to help healthcare providers more safely use electronic health IT products.

The Safety Assurance Factors for EHR Resilience (SAFER) guides are a suite of tools, including checklists and recommended practices designed to help healthcare providers and the organizations that support them assess and optimize the safety and safe use of EHRs, according to an announcement from the organization.

What do think of these efforts regarding patient safety—will your organization find these guides useful? Please share your thoughts.

Beth Walsh

Clinical Innovation + Technology editor