Top Patient Safety Concerns Touch on IT, Patient Identification Issues

For the first time, safety culture also makes an appearance on ECRIs annual top 10 list

This year’s list of top patient safety concerns proves that health systems continue to battle health IT implementation issues, while also struggling with patient safety stalwarts like disinfection, medication errors, and even patient identification.
Health IT configurations and patient misidentification led the list of the ECRI Institute’s top 10 patient safety concerns in 2016 (www.ecri.org/PatientSafetyTop10), while culture of safety concerns made its first appearance since the organization began releasing its rankings in 2014.
ECRI constructs its list from its own database of 1.2 million patient safety events reported by its member hospitals, root cause analysis and research requests, and safety alerts distributed throughout the year.
“It’s not necessarily based on harm, it’s based on what our clients are basically dealing with on the front lines,” says Robert C. Giannini, NHA, CHTS-IM/CP, patient safety analyst and consultant at the ECRI Institute in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania.
For health systems, the list distills potential patient safety concerns in to 10 primary issues that can serve as a roadmap for quality improvement initiatives.
Health IT takes the top spot
Health IT concerns have been a persistent issue on ECRI’s top 10 list for the last several years, although they have taken on a variety of forms. In 2014, data integrity issues topped the list of patient safety events, and last year concerns about missing EHR data ranked second.
This year’s list adopted a broader approach, highlighting instances were health IT configurations and organizational workflow that do not support one another.

This is an excerpt from the July issue of Patient Safety Monitor Journal. Subscribers can read the rest of the article here. Find out more about the journal, its benefits, and how to subscribe by clicking here.