How can patient safety concerns arise from Health IT designed to enhance or improve patient quality?
Health information technology is a great tool which has helped increase quality of care and
safety metrics in the health care industry. What needs to be understood is that health care
information technology is not a single tool, but a broad category and there are new technologies
which are being added to this grouping. With new innovations, come new forms of problems that
need to be tackled as they arrive.
Benefits of health IT include; clinical decision support, patient identification, information
sharing, and system interoperability. These benefits allow for medical providers to receive
recommendations and guidance for patient care, safe guards for identifying the patients, relaying
important patient information between different organizations and within them as well, and for
types of information to be used by different operating systems in the health care organizations.
While these are incredible benefits to have, many times health information technology systems
miss the mark on achieving these goals, and/or organizations do not use these safeguards as
intended which cause patient safety issues
Issues like these can arise from poorly made health information systems, poorly implemented
or applied information systems, or even a combination of all. Unfortunately, health IT is a
fallible concept and still requires a lot of oversight. Risks to patients and medical errors due to
health information technology occurs because of bad software, user errors, nonintuitive operating
system, and sometimes overly relying on health it products to detect fatal illnesses. This is not to
say that health care information technology is a bad thing, but at times the systems implemented
do not have the sufficient information to use the safeguards they were programmed to have