Most health IT-related safety events lead to staff training rather than technology fixes

While frontline staff report IT-related safety events, health systems often focus on staff training to resolve the issues rather than address the underlying technology problems, according to a recent study.

Plenty of studies have pointed to the link between the usability of health IT systems—particularly electronic health records (EHRs)—and patient safety. But when researchers from MedStar Health’s National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare analyzed more than 2,600 patient safety event reports related to health IT, they found almost two-thirds of those reports (64%) did not describe any actions taken to resolve the issue, according to the study published in the Journal of Patient Safety and Risk Management.

In most cases, when the issue was resolved the health systems focused on additional training and education for healthcare staff rather than engaging IT support to address the technology glitches. Only 45% of reports cited an IT-oriented solution to the issues, and 7% addressed the patient safety issue by establishing a new policy.