Clinical safety of England's national programme for IT: a retrospective analysis of all reported safety events 2005 to 2011.
Magrabi F, Baker M, Sinha I, et al. Clinical safety of England's national programme for IT: a retrospective analysis of all reported safety events 2005 to 2011. Int J Med Inform. 2015;84(3):198-206. doi:10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2014.12.003.
Health information technology can both improve patient safety and introduce risks. This analysis examined all safety events associated with the United Kingdom's national program for health information technology. The researchers found that while most events were technical failures, incidents involving human errors had a higher chance of causing harm to patients. Technical failures affecting 10 or more patients accounted for nearly 25% of events and were more likely to impact care delivery. These results underscore the concerns in prior reports about the unintended consequences of implementing health information technology on patient safety. The findings also lend weight to the Institute of Medicine recommendations that errors related to health information technology be reported and investigated in the United States. A past AHRQ WebM&M perspective explored the promised benefits of health information technology alongside the challenges of implementation and idiosyncrasies of available systems.
Magrabi F, Baker M, Sinha I, et al. Clinical safety of England's national programme for IT: a retrospective analysis of all reported safety events 2005 to 2011. Int J Med Inform. 2015;84(3):198-206. doi:10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2014.12.003.