Introduction and Evaluation in Healthcare

One of the recommendations for healthcare organizations to employ in an effort to reduce the number of errors is to advocate for voluntary error reporting nationally while conducting research and developing tools for patient safety. This way, information about errors can be gathered and prevented from reoccurring at health care sites and by health care providers. Voluntary error reporting will act as a warning of potential or actual errors and suggest ways to avoid them in the future.

It is shocking to know that every year 98000 patients die from medical errors that can be prevented(Kohn, L. T., Corrigan, J. M., & Donaldson, M. S. (Eds.), 2000). Medical errors are not a new issue in our healthcare system; these have been around for a long time. Hospitals have been trying to improve quality care and patients safety by implementing different strategies to prevent and reduce medical errors for past thirty years. Medical errors are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer in America (Allen, 2013). In addition medical errors are costing our healthcare system an estimated $735 billion to $980 billion (Andel, Davidow, Hollander, & Moreno, 2012).

It is critical in today’s health care field to avoid harm and ensure that patient safety in health care environment, especially with the attention of medical mistakes little is known about the importance of avoidable harm to public. The mistakes that happen in the healthcare setting are rarely the fault of individual workers, but usually the result of problems within the system that they work.

According to the article, the economics of health care quality and medical errors, in 2008 medical errors costs the United States $19.5 billion. It goes without saying that this a huge problem. It’s relieving to know that we are aware of several adverse detection (AE) methods such as voluntary or incident reporting, medical record review, administrative surveillance, clinical observation, and electronic health record surveillance. Voluntary reporting is the most common but unreliable way of detecting adverse events. It depends on the physician reporting and admitting that an adverse outcome as occurred. However, it has been shown to underestimate adverse events by a factor of 50 and often identifies issues other than true safety

New innovations are being created every year to help improve and protect patients from reckless and preventable errors. As healthcare providers, it is our duty to provide care ethically and to do no harm to our patients. On the contrary, “the culture of cover-up” still continues to exist today and although technology and informatics has progressively increased quality care, it has not completely eradicated errors. Integrity is the key component for every healthcare provider, along with other characteristics. Therefore, disclosing medical errors with our patients is imperative and our patients and their families deserve to know what occurred during their time of care. Technology is not able to prevent every mishap that causes patients harm (Gibson & Singh, 2003). On the other hand, communication and learning from the mistake can. As Gibson and Singh (2003) so eloquently stated, “…wise people learn form their mistakes, and those who don’t are bound to repeat

Since the 1999 report by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), To Err is Human, there have been many new efforts and initiatives to reduce the incidence of medical errors. While some people argued the report exaggerated the magnitude of the problem, others were concerned about the annual number of preventable medical errors.1 Medical errors include, but not limited to medication errors, hospital acquired infections, surgical mistakes, and communication failure.2

Unfortunately, physician's perceptions are not objective outcome measures (Schenarts and Schenarts, 2012). It’s very dangerous the fact that providers rely on the electronic system to catch our errors. Furthermore, some of the most notable benefits of EHR include providers’ ability to access patients’ medical history almost anywhere, at any time. Nonetheless, the heavy reliance on health information technology is a major concern. It has the potential to cause harm to patients instead of the intended purpose of patient safety. Some examples of this include latent errors that do not manifest until they have already caused harm to the patient, or system failures which can cause a delay in time for healthcare professionals to review records thus, causing a delay in patient care. In addition, patient orders can be lost or miscommunicated. Healthcare providers rely on with confidence that the computer system will seamlessly promote the quality care of patients. According to Fiercehealthcare.com (2017), because of deficiencies in the eclinicalworks software, patients could not rely on the accuracy of their medical records. In addition, one patient was

The Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) (1999) report To Err is Human revealed the United States healthcare system to be a rather unsafe environment for patients estimating that as many as 96,000 patients died or were seriously injured due to preventable medical errors. Incidentally, studies conducted as recently as 2011 have suggested that the actual rate of preventable medical error occurrence may be three times the IOM’s initial estimation (Andel, Davidow, Hollander, & Moreno, 2012). Statistics this extreme cannot be attributed to the mistakes or substandard practices of individual healthcare providers alone and thus it is imperative that healthcare organizations begin to seek out solutions at the system’s level (Geary, 2014). Therefore, it

One of the most complex challenges that healthcare facilities face, are the high occurrences of medication errors. Due to increased incidences of medication errors, it has become a major priority for healthcare systems to find preventions that could simply decrease medical errors. With evidence provided from different research healthcare systems are moving more towards using computerized information technology for simple automated notes, too bed-side bar code medication administration, electronic medication reconciliation and physician order entry’s as strategies to decrease medication errors (Agrawal, A. 2009).

There are now computers in every room, in almost every healthcare facility. Nurses now chart most of their medication administrations in the room and can focus on one patient at a time. A nurse must scan the patient’s band or some identifier and scan the meds before giving the medication to the patient. The computer program will tell the nurse if he or she made a mistake with the time of medication, wrong dosage, wrong medication, and/or wrong patient. In a hospital in England, there was a declined in medication errors from 8.6 percent to 4.4 percent when a new computer system was implemented. Prescription errors were also reduced from 3.8 percent to 2 percent. The new system was computerized order entry, automated dispensing, and had electronic medication administration records. Technology has greatly reduced the percent of medical errors, but not all of them, but by studying different systems and modifying systems hopefully medication errors will be a thing of the past (Hughs & Blegen,

Medicine is an always evolving field, and continues to grow in the pursuit of people health benefit. As time has passed better research studies, discoveries, treatments and improvement of patient outcomes has been the pride of the medical field. However; despite all the improvements in medical advancement, preventable medical errors have become a major problem in the field. About a decade ago, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) investigated and created the report To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System, in that report the IOM came to the conclusion that approximately 98,000 people has died yearly in the United States as a consequence of an preventable medical error (RWJF, 2011). Some of these errors are caused

The health information technology (HIT) topic selected is medication errors. In his March 17, 2017 article titled, “Poorly Implemented IT systems lead to medication errors” author Evan Sweeny discusses a the findings of Pennsylvania Safety Advisory which found that information technology (IT) systems implemented to prevent medication errors, may in fact contribute their occurrence. This paper will examine how HIT can both prevent and contribute to medication errors. The following elements are included, introduction, the rationale for selection, positive and negative impact of health information technology on medication errors, how informatics skill was relevant in assignment development, and

The safety of the patient is a worldwide issue and is not a single hospitals problem as noted by Aiken et al. (2012). According to Van Den Bos et al. (2011) some of the ways that patients could be harmed includes poor application of technology that is meant to reduce errors in health care. According to Tzeng et al., 2013 patients die unnecessarily year after year due to medical harm that can be prevented. The 2011 report by the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) revealed that over 98,000 of medical harm resulted in death which is about 38% of the fatalities related to medication errors (Classen et al., 2011).This has prompted the organizations and government Agencies such as Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to continually

The last aspect in increasing public awareness involves changing the mindset of the people from individual problem to systems problem. Most people believe that medical errors are the result of the failures of individual providers. The public believes that possible solutions to medical errors are to keep health professionals with bad track records from providing care and give better training to health professionals. The IOM report stated that it is a systems problem. They emphasized that most of the medical errors are systems related and not attributable to individual negligence or misconduct. The key to reducing medical errors is to focus on improving the systems of delivering care and not to blame individuals. Health care professionals are simply human and, like everyone else, they make mistakes. Research has shown that system improvements can reduce the error rates and improve the quality of health care. A 1999 study indicated that including a pharmacist on medical rounds reduced the errors related to medication ordering by

Medication errors result in over 700,000 emergency department visits each year in the United States, and nearly two-thirds of these hospitalizations are due to accidental overdose (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2014). Missed doses or overdoses are one of the problems related to medication safety (Anthony, 2015). A medication error is any act or occurrence which causes or leads to a patient receiving inappropriate medication treatment (Potter & Perry, 2014). Errors can occur due to failure to follow procedures related to medication administration, lack of communication between healthcare staff, deciphering illegible handwriting and underlying system factors, such as distractions and time constraints (Potter & Perry, 2014). Technological advances such as networked computers and other innovations have been placed in hospitals to study its impact on medication adherence; the following paper will compare and contrast these findings.