Accurate and complete clinical documentation is essential to high quality, safe healthcare. In this simulation study, senior medical residents responded to pages regarding sepsis or atrial fibrillation (phone encounter) and documented a brief note regarding the encounter afterwards (documentation encounter). The study found that written documentation following a clinical encounter included more important clinical information (e.g., ordering blood cultures for sepsis, placing a patient on telemetry) compared to what was discussed during the phone encounter.

Patient and family engagement is essential to effective and safe diagnosis. OurDX is a previsit online engagement tool to help identify opportunities to improve diagnostic safety in patients and families living with chronic conditions. In this study, researchers implemented OurDX in specialty and primary care clinics at two academic healthcare organizations and examined the potential safety issues and whether patient/family contributions were integrated into the post-visit notes. Qualitative analysis of 450 OurDX reports found that participants contributed important information about the diagnostic process. Participants with diagnostic concerns were more likely to raise concerns about the diagnostic process (e.g., access barriers, problems with tests/referrals, communication breakdowns), which may represent diagnostic blind spots.

Interest in testing ChatGPT as a clinical tool is increasing. This study asked ChatGPT to provide a differential diagnosis, diagnostic testing, final diagnosis, and care management for 36 previously published clinical vignettes. ChatGPT had an overall accuracy of 72%, with the highest level of accuracy at the final diagnosis stage (77%).

While the association between clinician burnout and patient safety are not new, the COVID-19 pandemic brought this safety concern back to the forefront. In this study conducted at 60 US Magnet hospitals, nurses and physicians reported high levels of burnout and rated their hospital unfavorably on patient safety. Increased nurse staffing was the top recommendation to reduce burnout with less emphasis on wellness and resilience programs.

Clinical decision-making is a complex process often involving interactions with multiple team members, processes, and systems. Using distributed cognition theory and qualitative synthesis, this scoping review including 37 articles identified seven themes addressing how distribution of tasks influences clinical decision-making in acute care settings The themes included information flow, task coordination, team communication, situational awareness, electronic health record (EHR) design, systems-level error, and distributed decision-making.

Promoting a culture of safety has been identified as an intervention to improve patient safety in long term care. In this study, focus groups with nursing, social work, and support staff were conducted to determine how the safety culture could be improved in four long term care facilities in Indonesia. Proposed interventions include new hire orientation, training, improvement in facility design, and increased security staff.

Patients and families are encouraged to play an active role in patient safety by, for example, reporting inaccurate or incomplete electronic health record notes after visits. In this study, patients and families at two US healthcare sites (pediatric subspecialty and adult primary care) were invited to complete a survey (OurDX) before their visit to identify their visit priority, recent medical history/symptoms, and potential diagnostic concerns. In total, 7.5% of patients and families reported a potential diagnostic concern, mainly not feeling heard by their provider.

Patients who access their electronic health record (EHR) through a patient portal have identified clinically relevant errors such as allergies, medications, or diagnostic errors. This study focused on patient-identified diagnostic safety blind spots in ambulatory care clinical notes. The largest category of blind spots was diagnostic misalignment. Many patients indicated they reported the errors to the clinicians, suggesting shared notes may increase patient and family engagement in safety.

New graduate registered nurses (NGRNs) frequently experience a knowledge-practice gap during their transition to practice. This article suggests that the gap has widened, as COVID-19 restrictions impacted pre-licensure nurses’ education, clinical training, testing, and licensure. Recommendations for improving the transition to practice include innovative academic-clinical partnerships.

Prior research has found that electronic health record (EHR) implementation has introduced risks to patient safety. Using data from one hospital’s EHR system, this study reviewed active allergy alerts in patient records and concluded that 37% of those records required reconciliation of allergy information across different areas of the EHR. These findings highlight the need for automated reconciliation algorithms and clinical decision support tools to help clinicians identify potential allergy discrepancies and avoid patient safety risks.

Clinician workload has been linked with poor patient outcomes. This retrospective cohort study assessed the outcomes for patients undergoing coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) performed as a surgeons’ first versus non-first procedure of the day. Findings suggest that prior workload adversely affected outcomes for patients undergoing CABG surgery, with increases in adverse events, myocardial infarction, and stroke compared to first procedures.

… steps toward improvement are discussed. … Kostick-Quenet K, Cohen I, Gerke S, et al. (2022). Mitigating racial bias in machine learning. …

Patient exposure to allergens healthcare settings, such as latex or certain medications, can lead to adverse outcomes. Based on data from an incident reporting system, researchers in this study developed a system for classifying allergy-related safety events. Classification categories include: (1) incomplete or inaccurate EHR documentation, (2) human factors, such as overridden allergy alerts, (3) alert limitation or malfunction, (4) data exchange and interoperability failures, and (5) issues with EHR system default options. This classification system can be used to support improvements at the individual, team, and systems levels. 

Adverse event reporting and tracking are essential components to safety improvement. This letter to the editor summarizes the barriers to accurate adverse event tracking in anesthesiology, including fear of blame or lack of education regarding the importance of identifying reportable events, and the role of Anesthesia Information Management Systems for improving incident reporting and tracking.

… to communicate important information which introduces a patient safety risk .  One healthcare system searched … “gloves” were coded “latex-natural rubber”). … Li L, Foer D, Hallisey RK, et al. Improving allergy documentation: a retrospective electronic health record system-wide patient …

Allowing patients to access their own ambulatory clinical health record has benefits such as identification of errors and increased trust. This study focused on risks and benefits of patient access to mental health care records. Experts suggested the benefits would be similar to those seen in primary care, such as increased patient engagement, with the potential additional benefit of reduced stigmatization.

Engaging patients and families in their own care can improve outcomes, safety, and satisfaction. This study brought patients, families, clinicians and experts together to identify patient-reported diagnostic process-related breakdowns. The group identified 7 categories, 40 subcategories, 19 contributing factors and 11 patient-reported impacts. Breakdowns were identified in each step of the diagnostic process.

This commentary outlines six benefits of the new requirement that health systems offer online patient access to their medical records, including clinician notes. Benefits include strengthened patient-clinician relationships, patient engagement, and adherence to mental health care plans. While online access may help narrow the digital divide, the authors also point out that lack of access to technology is still a barrier.

Health systems have needed to rapidly adapt processes to optimize safe care during the COVID-19 pandemic. This article describes one pharmacy department’s experience integrating emergency preparedness and disaster management principles during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the use of a department-specific incident command and delineation of responsibilities among pharmacy leadership (e.g., who monitors PPE inventory, medication distribution, workflows).

Computerized prescriber (or physician) order entry (CPOE) systems are widely used in healthcare and studies have shown a reduction in medication errors with CPOE. This study focused on whether CPOE systems improved the incidence of chemotherapy-related medication errors. The study included 11 studies in the review but only 8 studies were in the meta-analysis. The authors found that the use of CPOE was associated with an 81% reduction in chemotherapy-related medication errors, indicating that CPOE is a valuable strategy for this patient population.