Improving Safety with Information Technology

Health care is growing increasingly complex, and most clinical research focuses on new approaches to diagnosis and treatment. In contrast, relatively little effort has been targeted at the perfection of operational systems, which are partly responsible for the well-documented problems with medical safety.  If medicine is to achieve major gains in quality, it must be transformed, and information technology will play a key part, especially with respect to safety.  Information technology can reduce the rate of errors in three ways: by preventing errors and adverse events, by facilitating a more rapid response after an adverse event, and by tracking and providing feedback about adverse events.  Information technology can substantially improve the safety of medical care by structuring actions, catching errors, and bringing evidence-based, patient-centered decision support to the point of care to allow necessary customization. New approaches that improve customization to identify key changes in status and then notify key persons should be especially important.