Quality Improvement: How healthcare technology and evidence based practice can increase the safety of patients in the hospital setting
The interest in this topic is because safety issues remain a big concern in our society today. There are many sentinel events that could be either reduced or avoided by improving technology. For example, 47 wrong-patients, wrong site, wrong procedure were reported in 2016 (The Joint Commission, 2016). Many national efforts have been worked out to improve patients’ safety; strategies have been put in place as well as policy initiatives to meet this goal (Nelson & Staggers, 2014). Current procedures in place will be studied throughout this paper. Evidence based practice and peer reviewed articles will be used …show more content…
The fear that people had about getting hurt in the hospital during the healing process raised concerns and people started to investigate the issue of safety in the hospital and found out that many safety issues were either man made errors or errors caused by the system break down. So, efforts to reduce errors that are avoidable have been implemented in the hospital setting. A field of patients’ safety now exists to help prevent and reduce the number of sentinel events; many definitions of safety have been created. One is by the Institute Of Medicine (IOM) that defined patient safety as the freedom from accidental injury due to medical care, or medical error. Another definition another definition of safety by the Internal Classification for Patient Safety (ICPS) is that safety is the reduction of risk and unnecessary harm associated with healthcare to an acceptable minimum (Emanuel et al., …show more content…
So, implementing an electronic medical record would reduce medication errors, support clinical decision making, provide early warning of change in patients so consequently improve safety (Nelson & Stagger, 2014). As stated by Nelson & Stagger (2014), safety is one of the main goals of the implementation of an electronic medical record that could be made possible with a successful implementation of an electronic medical record. There are many things that people should consider when implementing an electronic medical record to help make it successful. Many authors have elaborated about how the introduction of an electronic medical record can impact safety. A study was conducted to estimate the impacts of a new electronic medical record on various aspects of practical function using failure methods and effects analysis approach in a setting with 32 staffs who were surveyed about how they perceived the frequency and severity primary care errors in 12 domains of practice. The results show that safety, improved in the domain physician-chart interaction, nurse-physician interaction, and patients in the planning phase, but in the domain of nurse, nurse-chart interaction, patient assessment, physician-patient interaction in the planning phase, were already previously affected and got further more affected (Singh et al, 2004). It was interesting to see that the implementation of the medical