The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has released nine evidence-based guides for safely implementing and using electronic health record systems, Healthcare IT News reports (Miliard, Healthcare IT News, 1/16).
The development of the guides is part of ONC’s Health IT Patient Action and Surveillance Plan.
Details of Guides
The Safety Assurance Factors for EHR Resilience — or SAFER — guides were developed by health IT safety and informatics researchers and are designed to help providers safely use EHRs through:
- Checklists;
- Practice worksheets; and
- Recommended practices.
The nine guides are focused on:
- High-priority practices;
- Organizational responsibilities;
- Patient identification;
- Computer provider order entry systems and clinical decision support;
- Test results review and follow-up;
- Clinician communication;
- Contingency planning;
- System interfaces; and
- System configuration.
Each guide is available online as a PDF and an interactive Web-based tool (Goedert, Health Data Management, 1/15).
Goals
In a release, Jacob Reider, chief medical officer at ONC, said the guides are based on the premise that “all stakeholders have a shared responsibility to make sure that health IT is safely implemented and that it is used to improve patient safety and care.”
The initiative is designed to help providers “effectively assess and optimize the safety and safe use of EHR technology within their organizations.”
In a “Health IT Buzz” blog post, Reider added that the guides are the first “set of tools that care delivery organizations can use to perform self-assessments and developer customized improvement plans” (Healthcare IT News, 1/16). Source
