The ONC has decided that it’s time to move health IT safety up to the next level, proposing a plan that would standardize the way health IT safety incidents are reported and make it easier to report straight from an EMR. And brace yourselves, vendors: this could include changing the EMR certification process to include the ability to make such reports easily.
The agency’s Health IT Patient Safety Action and Surveillance Plan is designed to strengthen patient safety efforts, including patients, providers, technology companies and healthcare safety oversight bodies in the mix. The idea, not surprisingly, is to use health IT to make care safer.
The ONC’s key objectives include the following:
* Making it easier for clinicians to report patient safety events and risks using EMRs
Right now, it’s not exactly easy for clinicians to create a safety event report when something goes wrong in their use of an EMR, and the data they do sometimes produce isn’t easy to work with or compile. ONC is proposing using certification criteria to make sure that whenever possible, EMRs make it easy to report safety events using the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s standardized Common Formats.
* Getting health IT developers to support patient safety and safety reporting
Within 12 months, the ONC plans to create a code of conduct — working with professional groups and health IT developers — which will hold developers accountable for:
— Creating usable, safe designs for products and adverse event reporting
— Working with a Patient Safety Organization to report, aggregate and analyze health IT related safety events
— Scrapping practices that discourage provider reporting of safety events, such as limits in nondisclosure clauses and intellectual property protections
— Participating in efforts to compare user experiences across different EMR systems
There’s plenty more to consider in this report, but I’ll leave you with these details in the hope that you’ll read it yourself. As you’ll see in the introduction, you have until February 4th to comment on ONC’s plans. I hope plenty of readers do — this is important stuff.
