Information Technology—Pros and Cons—Drug Shortages, and Workplace Safety in Latest PSQH

 By Susan Carr

The latest issue of Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare (PSQH) offers articles that focus on the pros and cons of information technology in healthcare, an interdisciplinary approach to managing drug shortages, new efforts to improve workplace safety for healthcare professionals, and more.

Technological advancements often present new hazards even as they solve existing problems, and electronic health records (EHRs) are no exception to that rule. In “Malpractice Claims Analysis Confirms Risks in EHRs,” Debra Ruder reports on what one insurer is doing to help organizations understand the risk of harm caused by EHRs. CRICO—the medical malpractice insurer for the Harvard medical community and a leading patient safety resource—has expanded its coding system to capture information about incidents related to the use of EHRs. In this article, CRICO shares what it is learning about how to avoid the downside of information technology.

Jennifer Lefeber credits Calvin Coolidge for inspiring Myrtue Medical Center to adopt an approach to EHR implementation that solved two problems. In “Medication Reconciliation: Getting Started with IT,” she quotes Coolidge as having said, “We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once.” Myrtue, a small, critical-access hospital in Iowa, was concerned that it didn’t have sufficient resources for full-blown EHR implementation but knew that it wanted to do “something at once” to begin to move forward with information technology. Myrtue started with a project focused on using IT to improve medication reconciliation—described in this issue—which also served as a successful on-ramp to a more comprehensive EHR system.

Drug shortages continue to pose serious concerns for patient safety and challenges for patient care, clinical workflow, and supply management. In “Interdisciplinary Leadership Team Responds to Escalating Drug Shortages,” a team from UMass Medical Center describes the process they use to manage drug shortages. Although drug shortages continue to create difficult clinical choices and increase opportunities for medication errors, the discipline required to manage the challenge effectively has yielded some unanticipated benefits and efficiencies.

In the news section of this issue, we report on resources that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration offers on a new website. “Worker Safety in Hospitals” includes national statistics and a self-assessment questionnaire to help hospitals understand the extent of workplace safety problems, lessons learned from hospitals that have implemented safety improvement programs, a guidebook to safety and health management systems, and an extended section of resources about safe patient handling.