Friday Seminar Replacement Activity – Friday March 23, 2012

HRSA Health Information Technology & Quality Webinar

Friday March 23^rd 2pm

“Using Health IT for Patient Safety”

James Battles (AHRQ)

Steven W. Chen (USC)

Dr. Eric Gayle (Institute for Family Health)

The speakers presented a review of quality improvement theory, including Donabedian’s structure-process-outcome framework and then spoke about the use of HIT to improve patient safety and some the limitations of current HIT. One of the limitations that I found interesting was the presence of fragmented HIT systems – for example, different electronic systems that are not compatible and/or can’t communicate with one another. As a specific example, they explained that providers can electronically prescribe medications but they can’t tell if a patient is picking the medications up from the pharmacy. The patient’s EHR may have a list of medications but there is no information about the frequency with which the prescriptions are being refilled. There are also issues of system compatibility and communications between healthcare systems (for example, between a hospital and a non-affiliated nursing home).

This was a “live” webinar, so I don’t have a link to share with the CTS community. However, HRSA generally archives webinars within two weeks of occurrence, so if anyone is interested I can pass the permanent link along once it is available.