How could informatics reduce the likelihood that medical errors happen?

Expert Solution

Health informatics is the process for collecting, storing, retrieving and using the health care informations for better communication and continuity of care among the health care providers in a digital format. It utilizes the health related concepts, theories in the real life situations to achieve a better outcome. One of the biggest example of health informatics is use of Electronic Health record (EHR). This has been designed in such a way that it shares its information within a vast area and with large number of personnels at a time including patients.

The need to develop health informatics can into picture or the digitalization of information handling was needed because it was found that a large number of medical errors happened in manual processing of information. These errors not only effected the productivity of work but also led to occurence of serious sentinal events in the healthcare settings. Researches have shown that use of digit format have reduced the incidences of medical errors to large extend.

These errors can be categoried as identification errors, interpretation errors, communication errors, prescribing and transcribing errors, error with maintaing privacy and confidentiality of the data etc.

These errors which is because of the use of illegitimate method of prescribing, ordering, unclear handwrittings that result in interpretation and communication errors , bulky storage of data resulting in unaccessibility of information during emergency, easy accessibilty of unauthorized personnals to health information could have been prevented with use of health informatics.
The informatics have made the communication of health information, safe (though chances of breech in data privacy exist) and transparent between patients and healthcare providers.
It is a feasible method to access the health care information and time saving.
Informatics are used in every department of the healthcare institution and found to be beneficial.
Its a great boon in the field of medication administration for physicians, nurses, patients and pharmacist. Every year a crucial percentage of mortality rates in a hospital is contributed by the medication errors. It has ensured the safety of drugs and also the personnel handling drugs.
It also avoids the misinterpretation of patients name. So protects patient from the harm due to wrong identification.
This also improves the quality of care as it provides staff satisfaction and improves their competency.
The use of informatics is also helpful in research and analysis works of the institutions.

Nightingale answered 2 years ago

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