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Showing results for tags 'Digital health'.
Found 472 results
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Content ArticleHealth information technology (HIT) provides many benefits, but also facilitates certain types of errors, such as wrong-patient errors in which one patient is mistaken for another. These errors can have serious patient safety consequences and there has been significant effort to mitigate the risk of these errors through national patient safety goals, in-depth research, and the development of safety toolkits. Nonetheless, these errors persist.
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Content ArticleLast year, the NHS published proposals for new legislation that is intended to reduce the role of competition in the NHS, and increase integration and collaboration between NHS organisations. The Patients Association have now submitted their response, making clear that while they support many of the aims of the proposals, they are deeply concerned about the complete lack of any clear role for patients in the new system. Co-design and co-production should become the default approach in the NHS, but instead the proposals take a traditional, paternalistic approach in which the NHS holds itself separate from patients. The Patients Association are writing to Simon Stevens, Chief Executive of NHS England and Improvement, to make clear that an appropriate role for patients must be included in the new proposals in order for them to be able to support any future legislation.
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Content ArticleThe panel of this HSJ webinar explored how digital solutions might help clinicians improve patient safety and what barriers there might be along the way. In a debate chaired by HSJ contributor Claire Read, the panel explored how digital solutions might help clinicians improve patient safety and what barriers there might be along the way.
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Content Article
Keeping staff safe during COVID-19: Risk assessments
PatientSafetyLearning Team posted an article in Staff safety
Staff safety is fundamental to running an effective health service and delivering quality care. This year has highlighted how important risk assessments are in protecting the NHS workforce, as it continues to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. We know that frontline healthcare staff are more at risk of becoming infected with COVID-19. We also know the virus has a disproportionate impact on staff from minority ethnic communities, and that many NHS workers are considered “clinically vulnerable” to COVID-19. There are also risk factors that relate to gender, age, weight and many more. This can understandably leave staff feeling confused about what they should and shouldn’t be doing to look after themselves and their colleagues. On 24 June, it became mandatory for all trusts to complete occupational risk assessments of vulnerable NHS workers. In this interview, Patient Safety Learning speaks to James Duez, CEO of Rainbird. James tells us how his company developed an automated decision-making tool, able to produce individualised risk assessments so that appropriate measures can be put in place quickly. -
Content ArticleBefore the emergence of the novel coronavirus and the subsequent pandemic, the health and care system had a poor track record in adopting digital technologies at scale. However, in response to the pandemic the healthcare system rapidly implemented new tools, many technology-based, to allow healthcare to be delivered when physical contact is not possible. The approach to using digital tools in health care provision is undergoing a substantial and rapid shift. Many of the technologies adopted during the first phase of the pandemic were already well established but not widely implemented; the maturity of the technology enabled the provision of healthcare through remote consultation to be much more prevalent much more quickly. Despite this recent rapid adoption of digital technologies, the health and care system remains at the early stages of digital health, with many tools replicating physical approaches and processes rather than taking advantage of what makes digital different.
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Content ArticleBarnsley NHS Trust Head of Nursing Quality Gavin Portier and Patient Safety Learning Founder and Chair Jonathan Hazan sit down to discuss how positive messaging and learning around patient safety produces positive outcomes.
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Content ArticleIn these times where the pressure of track and trace is ramping up around the world in the wake of expectations of a return to normality, Matt Pattison talks with Professor Effy Vayena from ETH Zurich about her work with the Swiss government in ethics, digital and the risks and rewards viewed under an ethical lens in the TEN podcast.
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Content Article
Could telemedicine solve the cancer backlog?
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Telemedicine
Although millions of patients with cancer around the world face delays in diagnosis and treatment because of the diversion of resources during the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a growing expectation that telemedicine may play a central role in easing the backlog. This Lancet Digital Health article explores how telemedicine will be key as healthcare systems move forward in tackling the backlog in not only cancer treatment but also diagnosis, and how augmented intelligence (AI) could be used to help to optimise its use. -
Content ArticleIt has become received wisdom that the NHS struggles to adopt digital innovation, with many government reports and research papers highlighting barriers to the spread of technology. Yet during the COVID-19 pandemic, many NHS providers have moved services online at astonishing pace. This paper, commissioned by the Academic Health Science Network, looks at four digital innovations in health services from the UK and the Nordic countries: the TeleCare North programme, which provides remote treatment for people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD); the Patients Know Best portal and electronic health record; remote diabetes monitoring for children at Helsinki University Hospital; and the Huoleti app that connects patients with a support network.
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Content ArticleThis report details the experiences of the Scan4Safety demonstrator sites. Six trusts implemented scanning of people, products and places over the two-year initiative, which was funded by the Department of Health and made extensive use of unique identifiers from GS1, a not-for-profit organisation that develops and maintains global standards for business communication. At these organisations, all patients have a barcode on their wristband which is scanned before a procedure. All equipment used for that procedure is also scanned – including implantable medical devices – and recorded against the patient and the location. At some trusts, staff even have barcoded badges which are scanned before a procedure so making it possible to identify which teams were identified in which procedures. The result is complete traceability alongside a full understanding of costs, at patient and clinical team level.
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Content ArticlePatient Safety Learning's Chief Digital Officer, Clive Flashman, discusses the patient safety concerns around the thousands of health and care apps in app stores today, and how we can ensure patients are kept safe.
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Content ArticleWith the widespread adoption of electronic health records (EHRs), there is an increased focus on addressing the challenges of EHR usability; that is, the extent to which the technology enables users to achieve their goals effectively, efficiently, and satisfactorily. Poor usability is associated with clinician job dissatisfaction and burnout and could have patient safety consequences. Using EHR surveillance data collected by the ONC, researchers from the MedStar Health National Center for Human Factors analysed over 350 reports regarding EHR issues that violated the federal certification programme. They found that roughly 40% of ONC-certified EHRs had the potential for patient harm.
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Content ArticleHealth and social care faces a conflict between safe and appropriate staffing and the (government) directive to be cost efficient. In a time of clinical and support staff shortages, increasing demand for services and financial austerity, there is a need for a consistent approach to workforce analysis, benchmarking and planning across the health and social care to enable informed decision-making across finance, HR and nursing management to put the patient and their safety at the centre of all we do. 'Establishment Genie' is an online workforce planning, safe staffing and benchmarking tool. It has been co-developed and tested with more than 300 teams across acute, community, residential care, hospice and independent providers of care. This has been supported by input from NHSE, NHS Professionals, The Florence Nightingale Foundation, Safe Staffing Alliance, Royal College of Nursing, Health Education England, Queen’s Nursing Institute and academic nurse staffing experts.
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Content ArticleSoftware is playing an expanding role in modern medical devices, raising the question of how developers, regulators, medical professionals, and patients can be confident in the devices' reliability, safety, and security. Software- related errors in medical equipment have caused people's deaths in the past, so the issue is not simply theoretical. Device manufacturers need to provide safety assurance for complex software that is being developed in a competitive environment where price and time-to-market are critical factors. Further, security issues that previously were not a major concern now need to be anticipated and handled. In this interview, published by Electronic Design, Dr. Benjamin Brosgol, senior member of the technical staff at Adacore, talks about these issues.
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Content ArticlePrescription drug errors are a leading source of harm in health care, resulting in substantial morbidity, mortality and healthcare costs estimated at more than $20 billion annually in the US. Currently, clinical decision support (CDS) alerting tools – computerised alerts and reminders – are widely used to identify and reduce medication errors. However, CDS systems have a variety of limitations, including that they are rule based and can identify only medication errors that have been previously identified and programmed into the alerting logic. A new study from Rozenblum et al., published in The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety, used retrospective data to evaluate the ability of a machine learning system – a platform that applies and automates advanced machine learning algorithms – to identify and prevent medication prescribing errors not previously identified by and programmed into the existing CDS system.
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Content ArticleIn this US-based article, Christopher Jason discusses recent evidence that highlights how electronic health records (EHRs) have the potential to cause patient harm in various ways.
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Content ArticleChances are, you’ve heard of an electronic health record, or EHR. Over the past 10 years, the vast majority of healthcare providers in the United States have implemented this technology to use in caring for their patients. EHRs have benefited us in many ways and hold tremendous promise. Given their widespread use, this technology now plays a significant role in the routine delivery of health care. Less understood outside the healthcare profession, however, is that EHRs have introduced new kinds of risks to the safety and quality of care, due to serious challenges with EHR usability, or the effectiveness and efficiency of using the technology. These well documented issues can lead to clinician burnout and errors that directly impact patient safety. In response, the MedStar Health National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare teamed up with the American Medical Association to show what they mean by sharing rare videos of real and simulated EHR usability challenges. They believe improving EHR design, development, and implementation to eliminate known patient safety risks and make them easier to use is the responsibility of healthcare providers, EHR vendors, policymakers, and patients, all working together.
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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 ArticleEighteen years after the advent of the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) why is investigating in such a parlous state? Ed Marsden, Managing Director of independent investigative consultants Verita, discusses why making improvements to patient safety comes second place to sorting out problems with the investigative process.
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Content ArticleNeptune's Dr Catherine Massey, Clinical Director, and Sophie Britt, Lead Trainer, tell us about their initiative and the difference it has made to patient safety and how it felt to win a Patient Safety Learning Award. They also discuss what they plan to do next. View video
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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 film features frontline staff from Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust explaining how they are using technology to improve the quality of the care they provide to their service users.
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Content ArticleThis film features frontline staff from The Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust explaining how they are using technology to improve the lives, treatment and outcomes of patients with sepsis.
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Content ArticleThis film features frontline staff from Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust explaining how they are using technology to improve the quality of care they provide their patients. The team talk about an electronic assessment tool for delirium which has increased screening of people aged 65 years and over from 800 to more than 5,600 in 12 months. They also explain how the tool has helped them increase the number of identified cases per year and reduce the length of stay for these patients. They also talk about the Global Digital Exemplar 'blueprint' they have created of this project, which is now available for other NHS organisations to use as a guide for their own local implementation of similar projects. The GDE blueprints can be found on the FutureNHS platform. To register, email: gdeblueprints@nhsx.nhs.uk
