Imagine that a health care practitioner is about to begin an encounter with a patient. The practitioner accesses a list of current complaints along with the patient’s electronic health record. Much of that record was acquired and encoded by intelligent interviewing software prior to the patient’s visit.
Problem: Many medication errors are hard to detect, but some that occur during the prescribing phase can be especially elusive and can lead to controversy as to whether they are truly errors or acceptable differences in professional judgement. For example, when a nurse fails to administer a drug as prescribed or a pharmacist fails to dispense a prescription, those medical errors are clearly viewed as pharmacy or nursing omission errors.
With the release of the Institute of Medicine’s report, To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System, the quality of our health care system has been at the center of the nation’s attention. The quality of health care has traditionally been measured by evaluating the structure and processes of the health care system. However, with the renewed awareness that patient outcome is the ultimate measure of quality, there has been a fundamental shift towards concentrating quality improvement efforts on patient-focused outcomes.
