The Informatics Opportunities at the Intersection of Patient Safety and Clinical Informatics
- aDepartment of Pediatrics, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO
- bSt. Louis Children's Hospital, St. Louis, MO
- cDivision of Infectious Diseases, University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City, UT
- Correspondence: Dr. Peter M. Kilbridge, St. Louis Children's Hospital, 3S-36 Administration, One Children's Place, St. Louis, MO 63110; e-mail: <kilbridge_p{at}kids.wustl.edu>
- Received 28 January 2008
- Accepted 6 April 2008
Abstract
Health care providers have a basic responsibility to protect patients from accidental harm. At the institutional level, creating safe health care organizations necessitates a systematic approach. Effective use of informatics to enhance safety requires the establishment and use of standards for concept definitions and for data exchange, development of acceptable models for knowledge representation, incentives for adoption of electronic health records, support for adverse event detection and reporting, and greater investment in research at the intersection of informatics and patient safety. Leading organizations have demonstrated that health care informatics approaches can improve safety. Nevertheless, significant obstacles today limit optimal application of health informatics to safety within most provider environments. The authors offer a series of recommendations for addressing these challenges.
Footnotes
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Supported by Prime Contract No. 290-04-0016 - 6275-AMIA-01 between the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) under subcontract to the National Opinion Resource Corporate (NORC) and the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality (AHRQ), as part of the AHRQ National Resource Center (NRC). Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and should not be construed as endorsement by AHRQ or the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the DHHS, AMIA, NRC, NORC or AHRQ. The authors of this report are responsible for its content.
