Recently listened to a ‘Faces of Digital Health‘ podcast from 11th August with Lea Davis (former Medication Safety Pharmacist at Perth Children’s Hospital – addressing medication safety. Interesting perspective on role of electronic health record and technology in medication safety. It is not difficult to see how electronic records and systems can assist healthcare staff in improving patient safety.
How do overdose errors happen?
Interesting observations by Lea Davis: All nurses, doctors, pharmacists busy – checking lots of charts, sometimes lack of knowledge, sometimes checking books, sometimes decimal point goes in the wrong place, sometime doses are transcribed from one sheet to another, if not checking back to references may not pick up the errors.
What is the role of technology in improving medication safety
Keys to success included a clear vision and strategy of the systems hospitals wanted to bring in, the problems they were tackling and the type of data they wanted to capture. Best practices related to vision, funding, implementation and not just technology, automation, robotics. Solutions include scheduling, management of systems, closed loop medication management (scan barcode on a package to verify that the does matched what was prescribed).
Integrity of information on medication management is related to the biggest clinical system (EHR/ EMR – including community medicine records) – with this you will have less errors. When you look at hospitals who do not have the budget for this – then major efforts required to integrate the patchwork of systems (a lot of work and time, interoperability challenges). More recently developments in HL7, FHIR, open systems are simplifying some of this integration/ interoperability. Benefit should be less burden on doctors and executives in safe patient care.
Future of patient safety and technology
Patients to have tools to better manage their own care. Reduce fear for patients. Able to be treated more often in their home environments. Patients to have more of a say in how the information looks as they transition through their care journey.
