Promoting Patient Safety Through Effective Health Information Technology Risk Management. Research Report

摘要

Health information technology (IT) safety has several dimensions: using health IT to make care safer, ensuring that health IT is itself safe, and ensuring that health IT is used safely. The potential for health IT to improve the safety of health care delivery has been appreciated for decades, but the role of health IT in introducing safety risks has been recognized only more recently. As the use of health IT has grown, users have begun also to observe its fallibility. Hardware and software can malfunction. Data can be lost or corrupted during transmission. Deploying complex technologies in a complex organizational environment can introduce new hazards and safety risks. Identifying and mitigating health IT safety risks is a relatively new undertaking for most health care organizations. The introduction of health IT safety improvement initiatives could be expected to face many of the challenges that accompany introduction of any change to clinical practice. Introduction of new tools and practices can require substantial organizational effort.