- Tina Reed, Staff Reporter- Washington Business Journal
Despite billions in spending in the last decade to improve health care quality, patients aren’t much safer today from preventable medical errors and complications, a D.C. patient safety expert said.
The reason for the problem? The very thing that the feds long hoped would help fix patient safety in the first place: incentives for health care providers to adopt electronic medical records, a process called “meaningful use” standards.
So says Dr. David Classen, chief medical information officer of D.C.-based patient safety company Pascal Metrics. In the rush to bring the health care world into the technology age, from mobile apps to digital patient records, providers are losing their focus on patient safety, he said.
“Meaningful use has completely driven what the focus of the industry is,” Classen said. “And you get what you pay for.”
The new federal standards for electronic records have spawned a huge industry in the health IT sector, Classen said. But companies in that space are centered on cost savings and faster communications — not necessarily safety.
“We know hospitals and vendors respond to these meaningful use incentives,” he said. “The solution is to rethink meaningful use.”
Classen spoke on the problem recently as the conversation surrounding patient safety heats up — earlier this month, MedStar Washington Medical Center released patient safety culture information gathered in an employee survey.
Pascal Metrics, meanwhile, released a survey showing that while 90 percent of patient safety professionals in hospitals feel they have adequate discussions about patient harm, fewer than one in four believed current technologies sufficiently assisted in showing detailed harm rates and patterns within units.
In Maryland, the Baltimore Sun reported recently hospitals are likely greatly under-reporting harm because they only have to report those events to a confidential system that has little transparency. One example, the Sun pointed out, was that none of Maryland’s hospitals reported bed sores, an otherwise common ailment, among the millions of patients treated between 2004 and 2006.
Earlier this month, a U.S. Senate subcommittee held a hearing on patient health in which experts raised alarm at the rate of patient injury and death that continue to occur 15 years after a landmark report by the Institute of Medicine. A study published earlier this year in the Journal of Patient Safety found as many as 400,000 patients die each year and as many as 4 million are otherwise harmed nationwide from preventable medical errors.
“That’s a bit of a scandal,” Classen said.
