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Is All This Technology Really Making Patients Safer?
September 2007
As the health care community continues to embrace technology - often because it is mandated by regulations such as HIPAA - we are often too busy to stop and think about the impact of all of this technology on our patients: Does it indeed make them safer?
I believe that, yes, technology does indeed, and helps to save lives. Here at Parkview Adventist during my tenure as CIO, we have deployed a variety of technology solutions to address various organizational pain points ranging from compliance to specific staff complaints.
Through these implementations, I have seen just how technology has positively impacted patient safety.
Electronic medical records have made a huge impact on our hospital. Every update, diagnosis and medication is entered into the health information system and electronically saved - there is no need to be concerned about whether or not a file is complete.
Additionally, electronic records eliminate the legibility issues we used to face. Not all physicians and clinicians have clear, legible writing, and any misinterpretation of writing could result in a negative impact on the patient. Now, we don't need to worry about that.
Since all of our records are electronic, people's names are now attached to everything they touch. This breeds accountability because there is no option to be anonymous. If there is a problem, I can go back to the lab and easily access the "who, what, when and where" right away. Since we can source it back to an individual, people are more careful to not make mistakes.
Increased Patient Safety
Before the shift to electronic medical records, patient history information was often passed from one staff member to another to another before it was added to the patient's chart. This mode of tracking patient history was like a game of telephone-the message could be garbled by the time it reached the person responsible for updating the record. Clearly, this could lead to inaccurate records keeping and, as a result, could impact patient safety.
For all those reasons, I have seen that technology really is making us safer. In order to get to this point of cooperation at Parkview, I needed everyone within the organization, from executives to part-time workers, on board with any initiative I worked on.
I accomplish this by working with staff to identify pain points and then researching tools that address these issues and help them do their job. My staff and I test every piece of technology (how's that for accountability?) prior to rolling it out to the end user to make sure it works. Then, as I roll it out, I meet with doctors and nurses to makes sure the solution is working as promised.
For instance, staff members had been complaining about the number of passwords they needed to remember in order to log into critical applications. To alleviate these password pains, I combined a single-sign-on solution with finger biometrics, enabling them to log on to any PC or computers on wheels with a single fingertip swipe.
This not only made the staff very happy because it was much easier to log in and out of applications, but it also increased our overall I.T. security and helped us meet compliance regulations - a win for everyone at the hospital.
Moving forward, as new technologies continue to emerge that address health care pain points, I will continue to take advantage of those that will help decrease errors, increase accountability, and make patients safer.
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