How To Ensure Patient Safety And Healthcare Improvement Through Electronic Health Records
Globally, 4 in 10 patients are harmed in primary and outpatient health care. Up to 80% of harm is preventable. The most detrimental errors are related to diagnosis, prescription, and medicines. Patient safety aims to prevent and reduce risks, errors and damage that occur to patients during health care provision. It is the cornerstone of high-quality health care. Therefore, we can only declare a nation’s healthcare quality when patients feel the utmost safety during treatment and are protected from errors.
Every year, patients are harmed because of unsafe healthcare practices. According to WHO, some typical results of patient harm in the world include diagnostic errors, medication errors and unsafe surgical care procedures.
Diagnostic errors occur in about 5% of adults in outpatient care settings, more than half of which have the potential to cause severe harm. Most people will suffer a diagnostic error in their lifetime.
Medication errors are a leading cause of injury and avoidable harm in health care systems. Globally, the cost associated with medication errors has been estimated at US$ 42 billion annually.
Unsafe surgical care procedures cause complications in up to 25% of patients. Almost 7 million surgical patients suffer significant complications annually, 1 million of whom die during or immediately following surgery.
A Story Of Medication Error
A true story is told of a child who died due to the wrong prescription. His paediatrician had prescribed a dose of tryptophan at bedtime to treat a sleep disorder for about 18 months. After one of the refills, he was found dead the following day. Later, an autopsy showed that the child had received a dose of baclofen more than 20 times the maximum recommended pediatric dose. Upon investigations, it came to light that a medication selection error had been made at the pharmacy, whereby one ingredient was inadvertently substituted for another. Sadly, this led to the loss of life.
Ensuring Patient Safety With Electronic Health Records
Admittedly, expecting a flawless performance of health care officials is next to impossible. After all, to err is human. However, there’s the need for setting policies to ensure patient safety and continuous learning from past failures and adverse repercussions of events. Therefore, we must build systems to ensure these errors are curtailed and checked early on and ensure a safety culture prevails.
Typically, the components of healthcare include doctors who consult in hospitals and clinics and declare final diagnoses, nurses who work with doctors to administer drugs, and injections and help with most medic implementation, pharmacists who operate pharmacies and deliver drugs based on prescriptions, laboratory technicians who conduct all types of tests, MRIs, X-rays etc.
These components and departments are plagued with poor communication and a general lack of patient involvement. Patient data is inaccessible to patients, and they are generally kept in the dark. Pharmacists don’t take their time to explain the side effects of drugs and what the drugs are supposed to achieve.
One way to improve patient safety is to design safeguarding processes at different levels to identify and correct such errors and mishaps.
Possible strategies to avoid patient safety errors and improve health care processes include the use of simulators, barcoding, computerised physician order entry, crew resource management and decentralised Electronic Health Records(EHR). When a country like Ghana has a decentralised EHR, the benefits are numerous.
What is Electronic Health Records(EHR)
EHR provides a streamlined sharing with health providers, pharmacies, labs, etc., of updated, real-time patient information. Patients can easily move their medical information and access tools that providers can use for decision-making. Beyond the basic functionalities like clinical notes and documentation, with an EHR, all the healthcare community members can seamlessly integrate, improve care coordination, increase patient participation in care, improve the quality of patient care and increase efficiencies and cost savings for practice.
In addition, EHR can be designed to act as a preventive measure against patient harm. It can automatically detect easily overlooked and underreported errors of omission, such as patients who are overdue for medication monitoring, patients who lack appropriate surveillance after treatment, wrong medications, patient reactivity to drugs, and patients who are not provided with follow-up care after receiving laboratory or radiologic tests results.
Why MedTrack EHR?
Medtrack is a health information management solution for healthcare providers and patients. MedTrack allows facilities to capture a comprehensive picture of patient health information, medical history and other clinical data.
On MedTrack, patients hold as much power over their medical reports as healthcare officials. In fact, patients can authorise healthcare providers to access their information. This brings back control to the patients and increases patient involvement. Patients are privy to all the components of their treatment, from doctors’ notes to lab test results and prescribed drugs. In addition, they can access their health history with ease, giving new doctors a chance to view their past health records to advise better.
With a simple sign-up using your Ghana Card ID, MedTrack unlocks a whole new world for you by helping you keep track of your health and protecting your precious health information — your digital medical wallet. As you move from one facility to the other, you can track all your procedures and stay on top of your health needs. Sign up on MedTrack today. It is absolutely free.
