Clive collaborated with the CEO of his client, Patient Safety Learning, to contribute a number of key points to this article on patient safety. Link here
The points raised were as follows:
4. Better access to centrally sourced and patient-generated data.
Care provision is often based on when a patient was last seen by a clinician. Having patient generated data from wearables or apps, could make available data more timely and contextual to the patient. This could make a big difference to:
Creating dynamic patient risk profiles in near real time. These could suggest optimum timings and approaches for interventions, probability of re-admission, or the need for additional support. As devices continue to get smarter and AI becomes more accurate, they could for example, read someone’s heart rate variability to determine future risk of a mental health crisis.
Highlighting trends in unsafe care so that they can be targeted quickly to avert more significant harm.
Understanding the impact of actions taken so that lessons learned can be continually refined and shared. Closed-loop learning is not yet well used in healthcare.
5. Adopt patient safety standards and embed these into new technologies, especially AI.
Solutions designed with patient safety standards at their core could be intrinsically safer. This requires including patient safety in the design stage of digital solutions, considering how the product will actually be used and ensuring that is as safe as possible.
We are currently working with several healthcare organisations to finalise new patient safety standards.
AI is as good as the algorithms used to create it and it is essential that those are also designed with end user safety as a priority. Parameters used to ‘educate’ AI, or the rules made available to machine learning platforms, should always include patient safety considerations.
6. Build safety more strongly into the user experience.
We need to look at technology design, intended uses, and how it is actually used. If we put new technology into an existing environment with individuals resistant to change, people might create workarounds, or ignore it completely. Redesigning the environment is key to successful adoption and safe implementation.
Surveys of poorly-managed technology implementations have shown they can become a safety risk. If the digital solution is not properly installed, configured and tested with users, then problems related to human factors may inhibit safety from the beginning.
Sometimes technological solutions such as electronic patient records can be highly complicated and designed for organisations rather than the end users – eg, focusing on reimbursement coding rather than capturing clinical observations intuitively. Delivering safe and effective user experience requires co-design and co-production by developers, clinicians and patients.
7. Patient safety maturity index
In the same way that providers measure digital maturity, they ought to be able to use a patient safety maturity index. This could be linked to an accreditation system based on patient safety standards. Digital products could have a stated minimum patient safety threshold that must be achieved before they are procured by healthcare organisations. Users should be encouraged to provide feedback on any safety issues experienced, and ideas to improve the safety of products used.