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Showing results for tags 'Care record'.
Found 68 results
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Content ArticleIn this powerful blog, the author draws upon personal experience and insight to explain why she campaigns for carers and patients to have access to their own health records, and the difference this would make to patient safety. "Despite continued promises of access to all our health information by successive politicians and the talk of new gateways to our health information linking primary, secondary and social care, to people like us it seems as far away as ever. We hear about the Empowering the Person initiative, projects to improve data flows, data standards and all those new Apps but citizens like us are still as helpless as ever standing next to that stretcher in A/E without the very basic information to save our loved one’s life in a crisis."
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News Article
Ways to identify EHR usability issues and reduce patient harm
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
An electronic health record (EHR) bug that transmits and medication order for 25 mg of a drug – not the prescribed 2.5 mg – could be the difference between life and death. And it’s that seemingly impossible reality that’s bringing more industry stakeholders to the table working to better understand EHR usability and its effects on patient safety. “Often times when people think about usability, they think about design and then they think about the EHR vendor,” Raj Ratwani, PhD, Director of MedStar Health Human Factors Center, said in an interview with EHRIntelligence. “In reality, it's a very complex space. The products that are being used by frontline clinicians are shaped by the vendor. But they are also shaped by how that product is implemented at that provider site, how it's customized, and how it’s configured. All of those things shape usability.” EHR usability issues are an exceptionally common issue, Ratwani reported in a recent JAMA article. About 40% EHRs reported having an issue that can potentially lead to patient harm and about 786 hospitals and 37,365 individual providers may have used EHRs with potential safety issues based on required product use reporting. Direct safety challenges typically come from EHR products that are sub-optimally designed, developed, or implemented. Usability issues stem from a very cluttered interface or a complex medication list. Seeing a cluttered list can lead to a clinician selecting the wrong medication. A major usability issue also comes from data entry. EHR users want that process to be as clean as possible. Consistency in the way information is entered is also key, Ratwani explained. Ratwani also wants to ensure that certification testing is as realistic as possible. He compared it to when a vehicle is certified to meet certain safety standards each year. This type of mechanism does not exist when it comes to EHRs because right when the product is certified, it then gets implemented, and there is no further certification of safety done at all after the initial testing. “One way to do that, at least for hospitals, is to have that process be something that the Joint Commission looks to do as part of their accreditation standards,” Ratwani said. “They could introduce some very basic accreditation standards that promote hospitals to do some very basic safety testing.” Read full story Source: EHR Intelligence, 13 January 2020 -
Content Article
Electronic observations – how safe is it?
Anonymous posted an article in Florence in the Machine
An honest account from a junior doctor on moving from paper to electronic observation charts and why user testing should be done before rolling it out in hospitals.- Posted
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News Article
NHS e-health systems 'risk patient safety'
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
Hospitals across England are using 21 separate electronic systems to record patient health care – risking patient safety, researchers suggest. A team at Imperial College say the systems cannot "talk" to each other, making cross-referencing difficult and potentially leading to "errors". Of 121 million patient interactions, there were 11 million where information from a previous visit was inaccessible. The team from London's Imperial College's Institute of Global Health Innovation (IGHI) looked at data from 152 acute hospital trusts in England, focusing on the use of electronic medical records on the ward. Around a quarter were still using paper records. Half of trusts using electronic medical records were using one of three systems: researchers say at least these three should be able to share information. 10% were using multiple systems within the same hospital. Writing in the journal BMJ Open, the researchers say: "We have shown that millions of patients transition between different acute NHS hospitals each year. These hospitals use several different health record systems and there is minimal coordination of health record systems between the hospitals that most commonly share the care of patients." Lord Ara Darzi, lead author and co-director of the IGHI, said: "It is vital that policy-makers act with urgency to unify fragmented systems and promote better data-sharing in areas where it is needed most – or risk the safety of patients." A spokesperson for NHSX, which looks after digital services in the NHS, said: "NHSX is setting standards, so hospital and general practioner IT systems talk to each other and quickly share information, like X-ray results, to improve patient care." Read research article Read full story Souce: BBC News, 5 December 2019 -
Content ArticleWarren et al. from London's Imperial College's Institute of Global Health Innovation (IGHI) looked at data from 152 acute hospital trusts in England, focusing on the use of electronic medical records on the ward. They found 117 (77.0%) hospital trusts were using electronic health records (EHR), but there was limited regional alignment of EHR systems. On 11,017,767 (9.1%) occasions, patients attended a hospital using a different health record system to their previous hospital attendance. Most of the pairs of trusts that commonly share patients do not use the same record systems. This research published in BMJ Open highlights significant barriers to inter-hospital data sharing and interoperability. Findings from this study can be used to improve EHR system coordination and develop targeted approaches to improve interoperability. The methods used in this study could be used in other healthcare systems that face the same interoperability challenges.
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Content Article
Royal Pharmaceutical Society: Ward round checklist example
Claire Cox posted an article in Handover
Ward rounds happen each day with your clinical team. In order for them to standardise the way they are conducted East Lancashire Hospital NHS Trust has designed a ward round check list, this is to ensure that everyone gets the same safety checks and important discussions are had for every patient. -
Content ArticleOur experience of attending the Patient Safety Learning Annual Conference and entering our patient safety initiative into the awards.
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Content ArticleThe North West London Integration Toolkit is intended to support communities, people and partners as they work towards the shared vision of integrated care. The toolkit is the culmination of over 200 individuals and organisations across North West London coming together to share knowledge and develop ideas as to how to implement whole systems integrated care. The toolkit is a living document and repository of collective learnings. It will evolve and be updated as local areas start to implement their plans and lessons are learned and shared.
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Content ArticleImperial College Healthcare NHS Trust maternity service provides care for around 10,000 babies and their mothers each year throughout pregnancy, labour, and the postnatal period. The Trust introduced the Cerner electronic patient record system including a maternity module for clinical documentation in 2014. Contractions and foetal and maternal heart rate are monitored using cardiotocograph (CTG) devices. Previously, the readings were printed out on rolls of paper. Midwives added handwritten clinical observations to these ‘foetal strips’ and used them to make critical decisions about the management of labour. These paper records were hard to share to quickly get a second opinion. They were prone to fading over time so did not always provide a permanent record and they were not integrated into the electronic patient records for our patients.
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Content ArticleElectronic health records (EHR) can improve safety via computerised physician order entry with clinical decision support, designed in part to alert providers and prevent potential adverse drug events at entry and before they reach the patient. However, early evidence suggested performance at preventing adverse drug events was mixed. In this study published in BMJ Quality & Safety, Bates et al. used data from 1527 hospitals in the USA from 2009 to 2016 who took a safety performance assessment test using simulated medication orders to test how well their EHR prevented medication errors with potential for patient harm. Results found that the average hospital EHR system correctly prevented only 54.0% of potential adverse drug events tested on the 44-order safety performance assessment in 2009; this rose to 61.6% in 2016. Hospitals that took the assessment multiple times performed better in subsequent years than those taking the test the first time, from 55.2% in the first year of test experience to 70.3% in the eighth, suggesting efforts to participate in voluntary self-assessment and improvement may be helpful in improving medication safety performance. The authors conclude that medication order safety performance has improved over time but is far from perfect. The specifics of EHR medication safety implementation and improvement play a key role in realising the benefits of computerising prescribing, as organisations have substantial latitude in terms of what they implement. Intentional quality improvement efforts appear to be a critical part of high safety performance and may indicate the importance of a culture of safety.
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Content ArticleTo ensure consistency and effectiveness of responses to health information under threat, Alberta Health has instituted the Provincial Reportable Incident Response Process (PRIRP) for all health stakeholders managing or accessing Alberta’s provincial Electronic Health Record (EHR), including its subsystems and repositories. This process covers incidents of data confidentiality, data integrity, and data availability and is divided into five phases. PRIRP is applicable to all health stakeholders managing, accessing, or regulating Alberta’s EHR, including its subsystems and repositories. • Health stakeholders use PRIRP to report a suspected or known security incident to Alberta Health. Alberta Health will assess the threat from the incident, and if valid will assemble an Incident Response Team (IRT). The IRT will be led by the Alberta Health Security team and include the reporting health stakeholder(s) and other applicable resources for any particular incident. The IRT will communicate as needed with other stakeholders impacted by the incident.
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Content ArticleDoctors and nurses must adapt their routines and improvise their actions to ensure continued patient safety, and for their roles to be effective and to matter as new technology disrupts their working practices. Research from Lancaster University Management School on the use of a computerised physcian order entry system in a hospital in Saudi Arabia, published in the Journal of Information Technology, found electronic patient records brought in to streamline and improve work caused changes in the division of labour and the expected roles of both physicians and nursing staff. These changes saw disrupted working practices, professional boundaries and professional identities, often requiring complex renegotiations to re-establish these, in order to deliver safe patient care. Managers implementing these systems are often quite unaware of the unintended consequences in their drive for efficiency.
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Content ArticleThis commentary, published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), highlights the value of explicit inclusion of context in Electronic Health Records (EHRs). The author highlights how discussions of why decisions were made illustrate important relationships in elements of patient care than can often get lost in clinical notes.
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Content Article
Patient allergies and electronic health records
Claire Cox posted an article in Allergies
This case study written by Matthew Doyle and published by PSNet, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, describes a case of a patient in the US who was given a drug they were allergic to, the implications of this and how to mitigate future events. -
Content ArticleThis joint statement from the Health Research Authority and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, supported and endorsed by the Devolved Administrations, sets out the legal and ethical requirements for seeking and documenting consent using electronic methods. This statement is aimed at electronic signatures obtained for clinical trials.
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Content Article
How to access your health records
Claire Cox posted an article in GP records
There are a number of different types of health record, accessing them is free, and healthcare professionals have a legal requirement to allow you to see them. -
Content ArticleIn this blog, Dr Amir Hannan, GP, describes how it’s normal for patients to access their electronic health records and easy for them to understand them at Haughton Thornley Medical Centres.
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Content Article
This is Me - My care passport
Claire Cox posted an article in Care plans
Based on a previous ‘Hospital Passport’ this version is designed to be used by everyone within a variety of care settings. The content was developed together by Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust Acute Liaison, Specialist Therapies and Older Adults services, Royal Surrey County Hospital and the Surrey Alzheimer’s Association.
