Dive Brief:

• ECRI Institute’s Partnership for Health IT Patient Safety, released a report Thursday with recommendations on how healthcare organizations can use technology to reduce errors from diagnostic testing and medication administration mistakes.
• The group came up with three safety recommendations: use and apply health IT to communicate information to the right individuals, at the correct time, in a useable format; implement health IT to oversee areas where it can correct deficiencies and improve tracking to “close the loop;” and utilize it to link an acknowledgement of a review of information and the record of subsequent actions taken.
• Diagnostic errors are estimated to affect one in 20 outpatient adults per year and are responsible for $34 billion in annual malpractice payments, according to the report.

Dive Insight:

The partnership, a wide-ranging collection of organizations ranging from Allscripts to the American Medical Association to Epic, focused on identifying ways for health IT to help prevent missed, delayed and incorrect diagnoses on diagnostic testing and medication changes.

The report is based on ECRI’s database of 2 million adverse events, a literature review and the analysis of a partnership workgroup chaired by Chris Lehmann, professor for biomedical informatics and pediatrics at Vanderbilt University.

“The problem of not closing the loop has a significant impact on patients and caregivers, and can lead to devastating effects on the outcome of patients," Lehmann said in a statement.

The report recommends that information be required to adhere to standard clinical vocabulary and definitions for the reporting of diagnostic results. In addition, findings should be reported in a format that allows for automatic processing, a recommendation which would require rulemaking, according to the report.

In addition, the report recommends that for highly critical events, functionality must be present to send reminders or reroute responsibilities to a colleague if a receipt and response to the information is not given within a reasonable timeframe.

“Accurate tracking and monitoring of diagnostic results and medication changes including occurrence, transmission of information, acknowledgment, documentation, and responses are essential to identify closed loops. Tracking of diagnostic results and medication changes is a time-consuming, burdensome task, but necessary to ensure a closed loop. Identification of interruptions and potential failure points in the process is critical to find and react to failures to close the loop,” the report states.