Health IT and Patient Safety: Current Status and Future Directions - Telfer School of Management

Health Systems Research Seminar Series given by Vimla L. Patel, Ph.D., DSc, FRSC, Senior Research Scientist and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies in Medicine and Public Health at The New York Academy of Medicine. Health information technology (IT) is designed to help improve the performance of health professionals, to reduce costs, and to enhance patient safety. If implemented appropriately, health IT can help to improve health care providers' performance, to provide better communication between patients and providers, and to enhance patient safety, which ultimately may lead to better care. However, poorly designed health IT can create new hazards in the already complex delivery of care. In the wake of more widespread use of health IT, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) in the US Department of Health and Human Services asked the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to evaluate safety concerns regarding the use of health IT and to recommend ways that both government and the private sector can make patient care safer using health IT. The IOM finds that safe use of health IT relies on several factors, making it imperative that safety analyses should consider the system as a whole, when looking for ways to make it safer. Vendors, users, government, and the private sector all have roles to play. In this presentation, I will discuss the current status of health IT and patient safety and the future directions in the context of IOM's report and its recommendations for monitoring clinical systems and over time building clinical IT tools that are even safer than those that are available today. Thank you for taking the time to watch this video. To find out more about the Telfer School of Management, visit our website (www.telfer.uottawa.ca/en/). All our videos, including lectures and events that may not be on YouTube, are accessible through Telfer TV (www.telfer.uottawa.ca/tv/).