This post is provided by guest blogger, Michelle Edwards, graduate student University of St. Francis, MS Training and Development program.
Current and future technologies are impacting healthcare. In particular, this article focused on the computerized patient order entry (CPOE) programs. This process is used by clinicians to enter and send treatment instructions electronically through a CPOE application; previously this was done by paper. These applications were created in hopes to improve patient safety to help alleviate wrong- dosing, wrong medication, wrong route and wrong delivery.
The article explains how there remains many flaws with these applications from many programs not having the ability to recognize an incorrect entry by a clinician. (E.g.) An error in the keystroke such as future dating for a year away, there should flag that alerts the clinician requiring them to verify for things like this. The article mentioned a pharmacist set a medication start date for a year away instead of the next morning these things could not only cause a delay a care but could lead up to and include an untimely death. Alarm and alert fatigue, currently clinicians override the system alerts and although only about 10% were incorrectly overridden, when we speak in term of patient lives even 1% is too many. These errors can impact patient outcomes tremendously.
The author mentioned AI being introduced into healthcare and how this will present challenges; AI tends to learn behaviors this could lead to the AI making decisions without the clinician being involved, as a clinician in healthcare myself this sounds so scary. I will say from the overall tone of the article technology has brought us so far but truly we have so far to go and still face many challenges that we need to explore with current technologies and the future technologies on the rise and to stay on top of these things. I will personally say that within the next 3 years there will be new jobs in healthcare that will deal with these exact issues.
Reference
Holmgren, J., McBride, S., Gale, B, & Mossburg, S. (2023, March 29). Technology as a tool for improving patient safety. Patient Safety Network. Retrieved from: https://psnet.ahrq.gov/perspective/technology-tool-improving-patient-safety#:~:text=Introduction,cost%20across%20all%20healthcare%20settings.