by Devidas Bhalerao
This Health care The community is a faithful fraternity, and this asks them to be extra cautious while taking the treatment method. A slight mistake can cost a patient’s life, so of all parameters during patient care, medical errors stand out in terms of preventable events. Medical error essentially refers to; Prolonged stay of the patient in hospital or additional expenses/therapy in addition to required treatment. This makes medical errors a leading source of adverse healthcare outcomes.
The incidence of medical errors is high, causing thousands of deaths in hospitals every year. Medical errors threaten the quality of healthcare, increase healthcare costs, and increase the risk of medical malpractice. According to a recent Harvard study, 5.2 million medical errors occur annually in India and across the world, accounting for 138 million patients (according to WHO). More than 1 in 10 patients are harmed during their medical care, and half of those injuries are preventable. Among the preventable errors, 12% lead to permanent disability or death of the patient.
Delving deeper into medical errors
Medical errors are one of the dominant and determining factors for the quality of care. Therefore, taking it lightly not only leads to poor quality of care but also increases the cost of treatment. In general, medical errors often occur because of a lack of safety culture. This includes a robust error reporting system and an internal quality control/audit team at the workplace. Besides, lack of knowledge and training, short attention span while administering drugs/treatment to patients, improper time management, poor monitoring and confusion about dosage may be some of the reasons why these medical errors occur.
Understanding gaps in patient care
- Reducing medical errors requires an environment of continuous detection and analysis, moreover, to understand, most medical errors can be categorized into (a) prescribing medication (b) inappropriately performing laboratory tests for the wrong patient at the wrong time (c). Filing system error (d) Administering wrong medication (e) Failing to promptly respond to abnormal laboratory test results. A common reason for the above situations of medical errors is that they could have been avoided if approached with the objective of quality care. In addition, effective training of all personnel involved in this ecosystem (clinicians, nurses and pharmacists) as well as improvement of staff competence can be highly beneficial. Consequently, reducing medical errors and contributing to better patient outcomes is a collective responsibility of the entire hospital management. This includes a cultural shift to use New Age Digital Efficiency tools. For instance, tools like EMRs help streamline the treatment process. It allows clinicians to access patients’ medical records while eliminating the pen and paper culture. This helps to improve the coordination of health care services, reduce waste and control unnecessary tests.
The role of A clinical decision support system (CDSS)
Improved patient safety involves three complementary activities: error prevention, error detection, and error reduction. This may also include using information technology (IT) as a key first step in transforming and transforming the healthcare environment to achieve better and safer patient outcomes. Digital technologies assist clinicians in the collection, retrieval, sharing and use of clinical information, data and knowledge for effective communication. Digital tools like CDSS help clinicians by highlighting errors and increasing error prevention. CDSS offers a variety of decision-making aids, such as alerts, reminders, advice, criticisms, and suggestions for better treatment. CDSS can reduce imprecision rates by influencing physician behavior, improving clinical care, and increasing patient outcomes (survival rates, patient length of stay, and costs). CDSS tools Assists in automated decision support, clinical research, data mining and patient disease management. Integration of CDSS into EMR is very useful and necessary, especially for research and improving the quality of care, as it makes the documentation process easy and accessible with just a few clicks. CDSS accuracy has been proven to exceed human accuracy in numerous cases. CDSS focuses on leveraging knowledge management to provide clinical advice based on various patient-related data elements. Devidas Bhalerao,Director Academics and Clinical Research, Ruby Hall Clinic, Pune.
(Disclaimer: The views expressed are solely those of the author and are not necessarily subscribed to by ETHealthworld. ETHealthworld.com shall not be liable for any Damage caused directly or indirectly to any person/entity.)
