You could easily prove patient harm to every single stroke patient by doing MRI scans on a daily basis post-stroke and seeing the progression of the dead area. But your hospital doesn't even know about this problem unless YOU tell them about it. And some typeA personality will eventually sue a stroke hospital for that reason. Standard of care will be unlikely to be a valid defense.
Survey: Patient harm tops hospital’s concern, but most lack proper data to fix it
The financial burden of patient harm at the hands of hospitals is likely more than $100 billion annually, but if those same hospitals had access to reliable, real-time data it would go a long way in curbing both harm and costs, according to a new survey.
Pascal Metrics, a Washington, D.C.-based patient safety organization, recently unveiled a white paper detailing the latest obstacles and efforts surrounding patient harm, which could be anything from patient death on the extreme end to an allergic reaction to medications.
Despite the industry-wide shift toward electronic medical records and the promise of making the health system more connected, scores of health systems across the U.S lack the technological know-how to best address patient harm, though many would like to, according to Dr. David Classen, chief medical information officer for Pascal Metrics.“For all the money we spent on technology, patient safety is still a huge problem in hospitals as well as ambulatory care in general,” he said, citing a 2011 study by the Institute of Medicine that spurred Pascal to take on the issue. “After all this investment, we still have all this patient harm that is occurring.”
To that end, more than $30 billion has been directed toward electronic health record adoption since 2009, but it’s been a patchwork of systems with varying degrees of success, Dr. Classen said.
Ninety percent of responding hospitals and health systems noted that patient harm is commonly discussed in their healthcare system, yet only 24 percent said they felt their current technologies show detailed harm rates and patterns in their units. That raises the question: Is there enough data to turn conversations into actionable practices that cut down on patient harm?
“Most hospital discussions about patient safety are informed by retrospective data that is reported voluntarily and only detects less than 10 percent of all harm,” said Dr. Classen. “Reducing patient harm must start with clinically reliable data that’s available in real or near-real time, so you can do something about it.”
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