The Impact of New
Technology on Health Care
Patient and Employee Safety
Research conducted in the Macroergonomics
Safety and
Health (MESH) Laboratory under advisor Ben-Tzion Karsh.
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Following the Institute of Medicine's recent admission that between up to 98,000 deaths may occur within hospitals alone due to preventable medical error, health care organizations have launched a concerted effort to drastically improve patient safety. (As a result, the discipline patient safety research, much of it carried out by Human Factors Engineers, has grown tremendously in the last five years.)
Recognizing that system flaws (i.e., problems stemming from various health care system factors: technologies, policies, clinician training, environment) contribute to high medical error rates, a key suggestion for improved patient safety has been to design better systems and to correct possible existing system flaws. Better technology design, redesign of extant technology, and implementation of technology to replace manual processes are remedies that have been specifically suggested by entities such as the Institute of Medicine and the Leapfrog Group.
Bar-coded medication administration (BCMA) systems, which utilize bar-coded technology to aid clinicians in point-of-care medication administration, are a specific technology that may help to reduce medical errors/adverse drug events during medication preparation, dispensing, and administration processes. Some evidence exists that implementing these systems may in fact reduce error rates.
This federally (AHRQ)-funded study examines how implementation of BCMA technology bears on (1) patient safety at a pediatric hospital over time; (2) health care employee safety, working conditions, organizational outcomes, and technology acceptance; and (3) actual and perceived changes in the work system.
(To find out more about the above study, feel free to e-mail Rich.)