Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: It is much more than just technology," says Dr. Hardeep Singh of Baylor College of Medicine and the Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center.He contends that safe use of electronic health record-keeping requires an understanding of the complex interaction of organizational, technical and cognitive factors, as well as the practice workflow of physicians.Hospitals and other health care organizations face increasing pressures to adopt electronic health records (EHR).But the potential benefits of EHRs, such as improved patient safety and quality of care, are limited by system features, user experience and policies at organizational and higher levels.Singh, along with colleague Dean Sittig, Ph.D., of the UT-Memorial Hermann Center for Healthcare Quality and Safety, recently proposed a set of eight conditions, or "rights," for safe EHR use based on human factors engineering principles.A clear prerequisite for safe EHR use is a system that is well-designed and capable of supporting the many functions that it is expected to perform.This requires not only adequate hardware and software free of bugs, Sittig and Singh say, but also an efficient user interface and appropriate clinical content.Breakdowns in care processes could result from errors or inadequacies in any of these features, at a potential cost to patient safety.For example, a poorly designed user interface that places too much information on one screen could increase the likelihood that a clinician would miss important data.Another roadblock to safe EHR use is the availability of qualified and well-trained personnel, including software developers, trainers, implementers and maintenance staff with specialized knowledge and skills in clinical informatics.Systems should be implemented with a thorough understanding of their utilization in a clinician's workflow, and with consideration as to where possible safety vulnerabilities exist.Sittig and Singh cite the American Medical
Authors: Dean F. Sittig, Hardeep Singh
Language: English
Subfield: Health Information Management
Field: Health Professions
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2601413519