Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Informatics
Date Submitted: Feb 28, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 1, 2018 - May 19, 2018
Date Accepted: May 19, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Health Information Technology in Healthcare Quality and Patient Safety: Literature Review
Background:
The area of healthcare quality and patient safety is starting to use health information technology to prevent reportable events, identify them before they become issues, and act on events that are thought to be unavoidable. As healthcare organizations begin to explore the use of health information technology in this realm, it is often unclear where fiscal and human efforts should be focused.
Objective:
The purpose of this study was to provide a foundation for understanding where to focus health information technology fiscal and human resources as well as expectations for the use of health information technology in healthcare quality and patient safety.
Methods:
A literature review was conducted to identify peer-reviewed publications reporting on the actual use of health information technology in healthcare quality and patient safety. Inductive thematic analysis with open coding was used to categorize a total of 41 studies. Three pre-set categories were used: prevention, identification, and action. Three additional categories were formed through coding: challenges, outcomes, and location.
Results:
This study identifies five main categories across seven study settings. A majority of the studies used health IT for identification and prevention of healthcare quality and patient safety issues. In this realm, alerts, clinical decision support, and customized health IT solutions were most often implemented. Implementation, interface design, and culture were most often noted as challenges.
Conclusions:
This study provides valuable information as organizations determine where they stand to get the most “bang for their buck” relative to health IT for quality and patient safety. Knowing what implementations are being effectivity used by other organizations helps with fiscal and human resource planning as well as managing expectations relative to cost, scope, and outcomes. The findings from this scan of the literature suggest that having organizational champion leaders that can shepherd implementation, impact culture, and bridge knowledge with developers would be a valuable resource allocation to consider.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.