Digital health and patient safety: Technology is not a magic wand

Abstract

The use of novel health information technology provides avenues for potentially significant patient benefit. However, it is also timely to take a step back and to consider whether the use of these technologies is safe – or more precisely what the current evidence for their safety is, and what kinds of evidence we should be looking for in order to create a convincing argument for patient safety. This special issue on patient safety includes eight papers that demonstrate an increasing focus on qualitative approaches and a growing recognition that the sociotechnical lens of examining health information technology–associated change is important. We encourage a balanced approach to technology adoption that embraces innovation, but nonetheless insists upon suitable concerns for safety and evaluation of outcomes.

Improving Quality of Care in Virtual Visits: Heuristic Evaluations of the User Interface in Telehealth

“…Although quality and reliability of the software being used to connect patients with their healthcare provider are important in the quality of the care they receive, the design of the interface being used is critical as physicians and other clinicians may not detect subtle cues that they could detect in person while delivering care at distance (Agboola, Bates, & Kvedar, 2016). Software reliability by itself is not a comprehensive measure of telehealth performance as a sociotechnical system and cannot foresee the impact of digitization upon already established work procedures and safety measures (Sujan, Scott, & Cresswell, 2019). To enable the healthcare provider to offer care at distance, both patients and the healthcare provider need to become viable entities of the telehealth system (Mort, May, & Williams, 2016).…”

Looking to the Future

“…They have not overcome communication issues, but offer us the opportunity to have better communication and easier pathways, if the implementation is successful. The challenge is to not replace old errors with new ones [26]. As most of the implementation has been in upper income countries, the spread of digital solutions around the globe will need to be carefully considered to ensure that the lessons learnt are applied with the safety of patients at the core.…”

Evaluating the safety and patient impacts of an artificial intelligence command centre in acute hospital care: a mixed-methods protocol

“… 1 2 Health information technology might help information flow across fragmented organisations 3 4 but investment and adoption has been limited, and is not a completely sufficient solution. 5 The result is a complex sociotechnical organisation that challenges healthcare delivery. 6 In the face of dynamic risks and organisational complexity, high-reliability organisations, like nuclear power plants and air traffic control systems, nevertheless demonstrate how safety can be maintained.…”