The goal of patient safety is to prevent harm to patients Mitchell (n.d.). Patient safety in any health system is critical not only for the credibility of the system, but for patient trust and satisfaction as well. Adverse outcomes are defined as any injury or harm resulting from medical care (Watcher, 2008). Adverse outcomes can result in death and disability and cost the health system dearly. Bernard and Encinosa (2004) reported that in the U.S. it costs twice as much to care for patients that experienced adverse outcomes. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) (2000) reported that adverse outcomes cost the U.S. more than 16 billion dollars or 6% of total inpatient costs. Therefore, adverse events are costly both in terms of human life and fiscal resources.
In Dept Analysis of What Went Wrong / Issues that Impact Health Care Quality
In reviewing this case study, it is the writer’s opinion that poor communication between doctors treating this patient, limited patient assessment, provider bias/judgment, and inferior diagnostic procedures contributed to this adverse event.
Poor Communication
Ongoing, clear, open, and transparent communication between physicians seeing the same patient is critical since this can reduce medical errors, improve quality of care, and increase patient safety (Institute of Medicine, 2000). In this case study, no type of formal or informal communication between this patients’ PCP, internist, and the neurologist was reported.
Assessment
In reviewing the medical care provided ,it seems that the patient’s previous medical history clouded her doctor’s decisions. Because of this, none of her doctors opted to dig deeper into other possible reasons for her daily headaches. Many factors that should have been...
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Hundreds of thousands of physicians have already seen these benefits in their clinical practice.” This is proof that in Canada we should continue to introduce electronic health records and help smaller practises with policies to help with funding. The benefits of electronic health records can drastically improve the quality of health and health
...iately discovered and the patient was fine, but had there been proper communication between the healthcare staff, such blunders could have been avoided altogether (Dolanksy, 2013).
Unfortunately, the quality of health care in America is flawed. Information technology (IT) offers the potential to address the industry’s most pressing dilemmas: care fragmentation, medical errors, and rising costs. The leading example of this is the electronic health record (EHR). An EHR, as explained by HealthIT.gov (n.d.), is a digital version of a patient’s paper chart. It includes, but is not limited to, medical history, diagnoses, medications, and treatment plans. The EHR, then, serves as a resource that aids clinicians in decision-making by providing comprehensive patient information.
Later in the article it goes on to say that in some circumstances, nurses, social workers, and pharmacists were too intimidated by the physicians to say anything about anything that they were questioning. I believe this plays a role in the systematical hierarchy that may be set forth in the health care professional environment. Another large factor in the ineffective communication between disciplines is that all of the disciplines have varying viewpoints of what the patients need first and last and because of this, other disciplines are unaware of what the group task may be instead of what their personal diagnoses of the problem are. Other factors that were listed in the article are limited opportunities for regular synchronous interaction throughout their busy daily schedules and unpredictable environment as well as differences in
Patient safety one of the driving forces of healthcare. Patient safety is defined as, “ the absence of preventable harm to a patient during the process of healthcare or as the prevention of errors and adverse events caused by the provision of healthcare rather than the patient’s underlying disease process. (Kangasniemi, Vaismoradi, Jasper, &Turunen, 2013)”. It was just as important in the past as it is day. Our healthcare field continues to strive to make improvement toward safer care for patients across the country.
The purpose of this paper is to discuss how Electronic Medical Records (EMR), affects healthcare delivery. I will discuss the positives and negatives this issue has on healthcare and how it effects the cost and quality for healthcare services. In addition, I will identify any potential trade-offs to cost or quality. Lastly, I will discuss how the EMR affects my job as well as any challenges or opportunities this issue presents.
Physicians and organizations are now evaluating patients with electronic data collection to improve a patient’s care.... ... middle of paper ... ... References Nembhard, I. M., Alexander, J. A., Hoff, T. J., & Ramanujam, R. (2009). Why Does the Quality of Health Care Continue to Lag?
Electronic medical records not only effect health care professionals, but the patients of those health care providers as well. However, nurses spend the most time directly using electronic medical records to access patient date and chart. Nurses now learn to chart, record data, and interact with other health care providers electronically. Many assume that electronic means efficient, and the stories of many nurses both agree, and disagree. Myra Davis-Alston, a nurse from Las Vegas, NV, says that she “[likes] the immediate access to patient progress notes from all care providers, and the ability to review cumulative lab values and radiology reports” (Eisenberg, 2010, p. 9). This form of record keeping provides health care professionals with convenient access to patient notes, vital signs, and test results from multiple providers comprised into one central location. They also have the ability to make patients more involved in their own care (Ross, 2009). With the advancement in efficiency, also comes the reduction of costs by not printing countless paper records, and in turn, lowers health care
Electronic Health Records (EHR) are the cause of a major force that is creating change in the health care industry. Dramatic changes, apprehension, excitement, along with fear and concern are the focus of a new era from paper charting to a new electronic health record system. Federal, state, regional and local governments are highly encouraging the adoption of electronic health records as well as the private sectors. The United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, and the Administrator of the Centers of Medicare and Medical Services have all identified electronic health records as top priority. This research paper will examine benefits and challenges electronic health records face, along with resistance to change and fear many have toward this new system.
In today’s health care system, “quality” and “safety” are one in the same when it comes to patient care. As Florence Nightingale described our profession long ago, it takes work and vigilance to ensure we are doing the best we can to care for our patients. (Mitchell, 2008)
Keeping patients safe is essential in today’s health care system, but patient safety events that violate that safety are increasing each year. It was only recently, that the focus on patient safety was reinforced by a report prepared by Institute of medicine (IOM) entitled ” To err is human, building a safer health system”(Wakefield & Iliffe,2002).This report found that approx-imately 44,000 to 98,000 deaths occur each year due to medical errors and that the majority was preventable. Deaths due to medical errors exceed deaths due to many other causes such as like HIV infections, breast cancer and even traffic accidents (Wakefield & Iliffe, 2002). After this IOM reports, President Clinton established quality interagency coordination task force with the help of government agencies. These government agencies are responsible for making health pol-icies regarding patient safety to which every HCO must follow (Schulman & Kim, 2000).
Journal Title: Impact of Health Information Technology on the Quality of Patient Care. Introduction: Our clinical knowledge is expanding. The researchers have first proposed the concept of electronic health records (EHR) to gather and analyze every clinical outcome. By the late 1990s, computer-based patient records (CPR) were replaced with the term EHR (Wager et al., 2009).
The purpose of the Electronic Health Record is to provide a comprehensive, standardized and universal digital version of a patient 's health records. The availability of a patient 's digital health record provides health information and data for critical thinking and evidence based decision-making, aggregates patient data for quality assurance and research. The Electronic Health Record has been, "identified as a strategy for effectively and efficiently coordinating and maintaining documentation of patients health histories and as a secure method of providing more informed clinical decision making" (MNA, 2006).
Ragavan, V. (2012, August 27). Medical Records Pals Malaysia : 17 Posibble Reasons How Electronic Medical Records (EMR) Might Support Day-to-Day Patient Care. Retrieved from Medical Records Pals Malaysia: http://mrpalsmy.wordpress.com/category/emr/