MidCentral reports double the mistakes from a year ago | Stuff.co.nz

Posting this to the network to have an open debate as to what DHBs are doing to mitigate safety and quality using digital health solutions.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/manawatu-standard/news/117321950/midcentral-reports-double-the-mistakes-from-a-year-ago

It would be good if there were a national strategy helping to guide DHBs on this. I know from my DHB’s adoption of ePA, that in spite of some clinicians discussing a relatively rich literature of mitigatable risks with this transition - that discussion was met with no belief that there was any risk and that monitoring and evaluation wasn’t necessary. “Its just like paper” was a refrain I heard often.
There are advantages to technological solutions, but to blindly adopt any change in a high reliability organization setting is pretty risky, and many of these solution have well reported risks.
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Agree Matthew - in a conversation I have had there was an assumption that because we don’t measure these types of things accurately with paper processes, we couldn’t possibly do it with a digital process. It felt like that view was based on how hard/amount of effort required to the required information.

An example of how digital is changing the conversation, is CARM reporting. If you look at the form on the website (link below) it turns out almost all of that information we have in the mymeds app, so it wouldn’t need to be re-entered. In fact maybe the ease of collecting this information would mean we can collect it more often ie. relating to symptoms rather than adverse events (as a less direct signal that this might become something more serious).

https://nzphvc.otago.ac.nz/consumer-reporting/
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I imagine there is good utility for CARM for monitoring adverse events.

Is there any proactive measures to reduce adverse events in the first place? For example, order sets whether paper based or electronic?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3956384/
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