The Pew Charitable Trusts Releases Improving Patient Care through Safe Health IT

The Pew Charitable Trusts releases Improving Patient Care through Safe Health IT, a report that explains how the usability of an electronic health record affects patient safety, highlights gaps in the safety monitoring of electronic health records, discusses the genesis of efforts to improve health IT safety through multi-stakeholder activity, and addresses the potential benefits of a national health IT safety collaborative. The work of Lana Lowry and Mala Ramaiah, both of ITL’s Information Access Division, provided a solid foundation for the efforts that led to this report, by offering the scientific basis for standardization in the IT health industry. Lowry and Ramaiah represented NIST in this Pew-led effort, which gathered representatives from the U.S. government, the private sector, and non-profit organizations. Also, check out this video that accompanies the report and highlights one example of an error facilitated by health IT: how a computer auto-refresh leads a doctor to pull up the wrong health record and how it impacts the care a patient receives.