Hospitals and Healthcare

Huge numbers of patients are harmed in U.S. hospital by safety errors. Their numbers could be greatly reduced by taking four actions: Make patient safety a top priority in hospitals’ practices and cultures, establish a National Patient Safety Board, create a national patient and staff reporting mechanism, and turn on EHRs machine learning systems that can alert staff to risky conditions.

Adam Fitzpatrick, 20, was left brain-dead after “mistakes were made” in the intensive care unit of a major Sydney hospital.

Learn more about how Zoom integrates with popular EHR platforms like Cerner and Epic to provide a seamless telehealth experience.

Almost 100 cases of patient harm have been linked to Queensland's new electronic medical record system within a year, including instances of patients being administered incorrect doses of drugs.

Most hospitals in the U.S. use electronic charts and histories for their patients, but varied, incompatible platforms make it difficult to share critical information between institutions.

Technological progress and new digital products have perennially been relied upon for improving operations. But the truth is, tech can often make bureaucracy worse. Electronic Health Records (EHRs) were hailed as a cure to the inefficiency of paper-based systems. But studies now reveal that doctors spend half of their time managing EHRs and desk work, shortchanging patients and fueling burnout. Dr. Melinda Ashton at Hawaii Pacific Health (HPH) proposed a simple and radical solution: Get Rid of Stupid Stuff (GROSS). She and HPH staff designed a simple form for reporting tasks that were poorly designed, unnecessary, or just made no sense. Simple fixes get implemented directly, more involved improvements get reviewed by the relevant groups for feasibility. With focused leadership and follow-through, GROSS has led to saving thousands of hours across the HPH system and to other health systems adopting the practice.

Before public health officials can manage the pandemic, they must deal with a broken data system that sends incomplete results in formats they can’t easily use.

Past upgrades to the state's medical record system have cost tremendous amounts of money, and on at least one occasion, forced clinicians to revert to paper-based methods.