Improving Patient Safety: Leveraging Health IT to Reduce Diagnostic Errors - Paper Example

Introduction

One of the biggest problems impacting patients' safety is an improper diagnosis of acute conditions. Diagnostic errors occur in all settings of the health care system. They contribute to a relatively high percentage of deaths and are the main reason for medical liability claims. However this can be curbed by ensuring that health information technologies support patients and the health care professionals in the diagnostic process (Starlander & Rydell, 2016). Health IT is a crucial player in the diagnostics process. It includes technologies such as health information exchanges, clinical decision support, laboratory, and medical imaging information systems, patient engagement tools, computerized provider order entry, and other medical devices. When health IT is fully incorporated into the health care system and reflects human-centered design principles, it has the potential to improve diagnosis and prevent diagnostic errors. The main goal of incorporating health IT into the health care system is to facilitate timely access to information, improve communication among health care professionals, patients, and their families, and also to provide assistance in the clinical reasoning and decision making.

By incorporating health IT in the health care system, it is expected that the percentage of diagnostic related deaths and other related severe illnesses occurring due to the same error will reduce drastically. With the providence of support in clinical reasoning and decision making, feedback will be efficient, and the follow up of the diagnostic process will be made more convenient, thus curbing the patients' diagnostic safety.

Free Flow Of Information

One of the main reasons of incorporating health IT into the health care system is improving the flow of information between the health care staff and the patients, and this can be made applicable by improving the Softwares applications and system applications to be able to communicate effectively by exchanging data and information without any technical hitches (Paterson et al., 2016). The free flow of information is critical in the diagnosis process since the process takes place over time, and it also involves multiple health care professionals in different health care systems. For health care professionals to create a clear and realistic picture of the patients' health complications or problems, information must be available and easily accessible. For the free flow of information to be achieved, the health professionals need to be appropriately trained on how to use and be conversant with the health IT tools involve information and data transfer. The free flow of information will be measured by decreased deaths and increased efficiency in follow up of patient's health conditions across the different care settings. There will also be a platform set up to receive patient's feedback whether they are satisfied or not concerning the diagnosis process.

Integration Of Health It Into Clinical Workflow

It is the role of the health care workers to fully understand the role played by the health IT in the health care system so that they can adequately put into practice without many complicated limitations. Several health IT-related patients' safety risks may affect the occurrence of diagnostic errors. For instance, in clinical documentation, the use of copy and paste of information may be taken in a positive perspective of reducing the time used in retyping information over and over. Still, it can also create a hazard in the sense that it creates redundancy, and that contributes to lengthy notes and cognitive overload as well as the propagation of inaccurate, outdated, or incomprehensible information.

Health IT Vendors

Contractual provisions that are put up to protect the vendor's intellectual property interest from unsafe use of health IT tools may end up inhibiting the free flow of information about patients (Lynn & Lynn, 2019). This contractual inhibiter among the health IT vendors may end up causing more risks to the use of data for future patients' safety and quality improvement researches. To curb this, the health care system needs to put up standards for interoperability of the health IT system to support sufficient, efficient and structured flow of patients information across different health care settings to facilitate the diagnostics process.

Resources Needed

For the health IT to be appropriately incorporated into the health care system as a way to improve patients' safety, there are specific resources that need to be set aside for that particular objective to be met. First things first, the government needs to allocate more faces to the health care system to enable it to cope with its related trends in a move to improve patients' safety. There is also a need for the education system to incorporate IT-related practical pieces of training for the medical students to enable them to be able to be conversant with the health IT tools.

References

Paterson, C., El-Mokadem, I., Coles, B., Baker, L., Canfield, S. E., & Nabi, G. (2016). Safety and diagnostic accuracy of image guided biopsies in patients with small renal masses. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2016(6), 1-11.

Starlander, I., & Rydell, S. (2016). Diagnostics of Ultrasound Resolution, Contrast & Safety.

Lynn, L. A., & Lynn, E. N. (2019). U.S. Patent No. 10,366,790. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.