In the ECRI Institute's "Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for Healthcare Organizations" for 2016, technology appears to play an increasingly worrisome role in patient safety.
The No. 1 patient safety hazard on this year's list is "health IT configurations and organizational workflow that do not support each other," and the No. 2 patient safety hazard is patient identification errors.
With regard to unsupported and disjointed workflow, Robert Giannini, patient safety analyst and consultant with the ECRI Institute, said in a statement that too often hospitals don't tailor a system to work within their system, and hospital employees too often don't try to adapt to the new technology. "After the implementation, people continue to do things the same way and really don't adjust the health IT system or their workflow," he said. This can lead to communication errors and, ultimately, patient safety hazards.
Additionally, patient identification issues are surfacing more often, and are not only frequent but have serious effects on patient safety.
To read the full list, click here.
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