Reducing Preventable Readmissions Could Help Reduce Hospital Negligence
Leaving the hospital can be a sign that a person is on the road to recovery or has reached a point where his or her care can be managed at home. Many people look forward to this and often consider it the beginning of a new chapter. Unfortunately, there are some people who cannot move forward as quickly as they would have hoped. For some patients, the 30 days after being released from the hospital can be a vulnerable and fragile period of time and many people develop or continue to experience adverse health conditions that jeopardize their recovery. This is referred to as post-hospital syndrome. According to a study on post-hospital syndrome, patients leaving the hospital face some amount of risk once they are out …
Health information technology is not immune to human error
Doctors can make mistakes when calculating the proper dosage of a medication. They can fail to read a patient’s chart before prescribing a certain type of medication. In other cases, a patient’s chart may be missing information vital for a doctor to designate the appropriate course of treatment. The examples listed above only scratch the surface of the types of doctor errors that can lead to serious, and preventable, injuries to patients. Over the past few years the health care industry has begun introducing health information technology (health IT) and electronic health records (EHRs) to help reduce the potential for human errors. While the aim of health IT is to reduce doctor errors it still relies on humans to use and maintain it and as we all …