This appeared a few days ago.
ONC updates health IT safety guides for providers
Published March 29 2017, 7:25am EDT
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has released updated guides to help providers assess the safety and usability of their respective electronic health record systems.
First published in January 2014, the ONC Safety Assurance Factors for EHR Resilience (SAFER) guides are voluntary provider self-assessments that take the form of vulnerability checklists as well as evidence-based recommendations and best practices for how to safely use health IT.
Recommended best practices in the SAFER guides help organizations know what to do to optimize the safety and safe use of their EHRs. Specifically, the guides address nine areas—high-priority practices; organizational responsibilities; contingency planning; system configuration; system interfaces; patient identification; computerized provider order entry with decision support; test results reporting and follow-up; and clinician communication.
Each guide contains 10 to 25 recommended practices that can be assessed as fully implemented, partially implemented or not implemented.
“These checklists allow you to work through a really simple format for asking yourself questions about your system as it exists right now,” says Rebecca Freeman, ONC’s chief nursing officer. “It gives you the chance to systematically identify gaps or hotspots that may need a little attention.”
Key updates to the SAFER guides include:
- The Test Results and Follow-up Reporting Guide, which recommends practices to optimize the safety and safe use of the EHR with respect to diagnostic testing, calls for improving communication of abnormal results to patients. It’s based on recommendations from a 2015 National Academy of Medicine report.
- The Contingency Planning Guide, which identifies recommended safety practices associated with planned or unplanned EHR unavailability, addresses best practices for prevention and mitigation of ransomware attacks as well as new recommendations about “downtimes”—those times when systems are completely unavailable or partially unavailable, when response times are unacceptably slow.
Freeman notes that she came to ONC “out of the implementation space” where she has “implemented—from start to finish—these health records” in ambulatory and community hospital settings. At the same time, she contends that, despite widespread adoption of EHRs by provider organizations “they’re not super user-friendly for many of our clinicians,” regardless of the healthcare environment in which the systems operate.
“Many of the reasons for usability and user experience issues have to do with the decisions that were made when the system was being put in place,” says Freeman. “What we need to focus on now is how to make the systems more usable and really keep an eye towards safety.”
More here:
Here is the link to the information and resources:
There is a great deal of useful material here to be downloaded and learnt from.
David.
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