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Health IT impact on patient safety

Abstract.

The use of health information technology (HIT) in healthcare has rapidly increased over the last decade. Many healthcare providers/facilities invest in hardware and software that are used to electronically create, maintain, analyse, store, or receive information to help in the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of diseases. This evolution involves consolidating a hospital’s various departmental systems and data to improve the efficiency of its processes. According to a study by World Health Organization (WHO), there has been a steady increase in the adoption of EHR systems globally in the past 15 years, with a 46% increase reported between 2010- 2015.

Although HIT adoption has increased substantially in recent years, concerns such as readiness of the ecosystem, cost of adoptions and availability of technical support remain as some of the many challenges in adopting and achieving the intended outcome of the system.  To fully harvest the benefits of HIT in healthcare, the ecosystem support such as infrastructure, policies etc must exist for it to be feasible. Leadership support and competent team will be required to implement and maintain the consistency of HIT system while reducing risks. A continuous feedback approach to identify potential risk in HIT system that includes a sociotechnical model will be presented.

 

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