RAND Promotes SAFER Patient Health IT Risk Management

Promoting Patient Safety Through Effective Health Information Technology Risk Management | RAND

The potential for health information technology (IT) to improve health care delivery has been appreciated for decades, but "digitizing" health care can also introduce new risks and even harm. As the use of health IT has grown, these risks have become more apparent. The authors of this report evaluated the efforts of 11 hospitals and ambulatory practices to use an improvement strategy and tools developed to promote safe use of health IT and to diagnose, monitor, and mitigate health IT–related safety risks. Through interviews, the authors discovered that some health care organizations (especially hospitals) with expertise in process improvement were able to identify and begin to mitigate health safety risks, but in most others, awareness of these risks was limited (especially in ambulatory practices).

The authors concluded that better tools like the recently released Safety Assurance Factors for EHR Resilience (SAFER) Guides are needed to help organizations optimize the safe use of health IT. However, health care organizations will require a better understanding of the safety risks posed by electronic health record (EHR) use to take full advantage of the SAFER Guides. There may also be a need for additional tools and metrics (and further usability studies of existing tools and metrics) to better support the needs of health care organizations as they increasingly rely on health IT to improve the quality and safety of patient care.

Please note: This report is not available on the RAND website but can be downloaded from the healthit.gov website.

Electronic Health Record Risks | The Doctors Company

In the fall of 2011, the Institute of Medicine issued a report titled Health IT and Patient Safety: Building Better Systems for Better Care. It concluded that the information needed for analysis and assessment of the safety of health IT (HIT) and its use isn’t available, adding that our understanding of EHR benefits and risks is largely anecdotal. The report recommends creating a federal agency for systematic and uniform data collection to investigate harm and safety events related to HIT. Currently, PDR Network’s EHRevent is the only national reporting system for EHR users to document adverse events. This Web-based, confidential EHR Safety Event Reporting System is available at www.EHRevent.org. Report confidentiality is protected through its designation as a certified Patient Safety Organization.

The discussion of EHR benefits and risks that follows is based on articles and reports appearing in peer-reviewed and non–peer-reviewed medical literature and in the EHRevent Newsletter, a publication that features an “Event of the Month” reported to EHRevent.org.

Electronic health record systems: risks and benefits -- Ohno-Machado 21 (e1): e1 -- Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association

Published on Feb 19, 2014

The SAFER Guides are designed to help healthcare organizations conduct self-assessments to optimize the safety and safe use of electronic health records (EHRs) in the following areas:

• High Priority Practices, 
• Organizational Responsibilities, 
• Contingency Planning, 
• System Configuration, 
• System Interfaces, 
• Patient Identification, 
• Computerized Provider Order Entry with Decision Support, 
• Test Results Reporting and