Health IT Case Study Essay

The purpose of this introduction is to discuss my answers to the case study questions about identifying and addressing unsafe conditions associated with health internet technology (health IT). Health IT allows health care workers to better maintain patient care through a computerized system. It keeps patients medical records electronic and allows nurses to keep track of medication administration. Issues can arise with the health IT system that affects patient safety.
The two types of health internet technology (IT) related incidents are a computer user and health IT system. The computer user can cause incidents through human error. For example, the user can make mistakes by not being trained properly, not entering data into the system, and not reviewing lab results in time. The health IT system can cause incidents through both software and hardware issues. Some examples of computer related problems are a slow network and lost data (Giannini, Possanza, Solomon, Wallace, & Zimmer, 2013).
The case study is about an incident that made a patient overdose on morphine. The physician ordered extended release morphine every twelve hours and immediate release morphine as needed
for breakthrough pain. The electronic medication administration record (eMAR) did not show the drug doses of the morphine due to a cut off in the display. This caused the patient to have an overdose and suffer from respiratory arrest. The patient was intubated and resuscitated successfully (Giannini et al., 2013). The type of incident seen in this case study was a health IT system incident. Due to the health IT system incident in the case study, the patient could have died or fall into a coma.
Nurse leaders can establish a culture of safety related to health IT by addressing all errors caused by staff and computer related incidents.
Having a no punitive approach to reporting and learning from adverse events, close calls and unsafe conditions is important (Joint Commission, 2017). The nurse leader must educate and reinforce the importance for staff members to report all health it related incidents. The nurse leader can also emphasize with staff members that not only is the organization collecting only computer related issues but on things that made it difficult for the computer user to navigate the health IT system. The nurse leader can research nursing and healthcare literature about evidenced based patient safety. This can be used as helpful resource to be shared with staff
members.
During my clinical experience, I had a potential error that was caught. I had multiple health records open and I was charting on the wrong patient. I caught my mistake before saving my documentation. I realized I had multiple records open on the computer. This is an example of a potential computer user incident. I learned from my mistake and now I am very cautious in making sure to have one patient record open at a time to prevent myself from charting in the wrong patient’s record.
In conclusion, it is vital for nurses to report any potential issues that are computer related or computer user related. In order for the health IT system to fix the problem health care professionals must report errors and near. There could be gap in the system that needs to be fixed in order to promote patient safety. Also the health IT system is not invincible, that means computer users must double check what they are doing when using the eMAR. We cannot rely on technology to catch our errors.