People attend medical facilities for a range of different reasons, but it’s mostly to do with receiving a diagnosis or treatment. Regardless of the reason for visiting, it’s safe to assume that people don’t expect to suffer injuries or be treated poorly as a result of poor management or malpractice. Even though the number of reported incidents has declined, there is still an alarmingly large amount of risk for patients attending medical facilities. Leading the race when it comes to change is technology, so we’ll take a look at a series of examples below.
Preventing drug prescription errors
Patients being prescribed the wrong medications are among the top complaints when it comes to medical errors. This can cause severe complications and leave patients searching for an emergency room malpractice attorney to claim compensation. Naturally, paying for the price of lawsuits doesn’t come cheap and often puts strain on medical facility budgets, which is a shame when these issues are so easy to avoid.
These issues are being addressed using technology including EMRs (electronic medical records), which can automatically scan through patient data to find any anomalies. As well as this, a tool called Pascal Metrics is helping healthcare facilities to reduce patient harm by around 80%.
Reducing surgical complications
Healthcare facilities are introducing a number of AI (artificial intelligence), blockchain, and other ground-breaking technologies in an attempt to reduce medical errors. For example, surgical errors in the US happen around 4000 times a year, and they’re often easily avoidable issues.
Even though surgeons go through rigorous checklists before and after starting a procedure, there are still many potential complications missed, which can result in further injuries or death. Fortunately, researchers from the University of Florida came up with MySurgeryRisk, which is an AI-powered tool for analyzing potential complications.
Enforcing strict protocols
Although hospitals help to cure illnesses, there are a number of infections that patients can acquire while visiting including MRSA. To reduce the spread of infections, medical staff have strict protocols to follow in almost every area of their work. However, when the number of patients becomes too much, personnel can fall behind.
The technological solution for this one is relatively straightforward. By integrating a health and safety dashboard into the EMR, the system can automatically scan for and alert medical of any missed steps or areas that need cleaning.
Preventing slips and falls
The National Institute of Health suggests that there are around 1 million patient falls in US hospitals, which leads to 11,000 deaths and 250,000 injuries. To help curve this overwhelming eye-watering statistic, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in collaboration with other facilities, created a programme called Fall TIPS (Tailoring Interventions for Patient Safety). This innovative tool allows nurses to analyze patient risk and reduce falls by putting additional plans in place – like regular assisted toilet trips.
The healthcare industry is designed to save lives, but it’s still responsible for a large number of complications and deaths. Through technologies like those outlined above, the occurrence of medical errors should reduce greatly.
