The Health IT Policy Committee endorsed recommendations for the creation of a national database to which healthcare providers could confidentially report patient data errors and unsafe conditions they encounter using electronic health records. Reporting of safety issues would become part of Stage 2 of meaningful use requirements.
A patient safety organization would also be established to analyze the reports and emphasize tracking and sharing information from the database to make healthcare a learning system, according to the Health and Human Services Department advisory panel at its meeting April 21.
The committee will deliver the recommendations to the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) to decide whether to adopt them and to define how the patient safety proposals would be put into practice, said Paul Egerman, who co-chairs the certification and adoption panel that authored the working document.
Only a minority of patient safety risks are the result of software flaws, said Egerman.
“It’s more issues of complex interactions of people and technology, training and interoperability,” he said. For instance, when providers order medications through their electronic health record systems (EHRs), “so many alerts are presented to the ordering physician that they ignore 90 percent of them. When you start to ignore the alerts, it is possible you will miss something important,” Egerman said.
