Patient Safety Informatics: Adverse Drug Events, Human Factors and IT Tools for Patient Medication Safety

Improving patient safety and the quality of healthcare poses many challenges, and information technology (IT) can support the measures necessary to address these. Unfortunately, the risk of adverse drug events (ADEs) rises alongside the increasing sophistication of the health IT systems incorporated into hospital environments. These pose a risk to the safety of patients and incur considerable extra healthcare costs. Approaches introduced to eliminate ADEs raise a number of concerns, not least that the successful transferability and use of such tools into real clinical settings is only possible by means of a holistic, validated and qualitative approach. This book is a collection of papers presented at the second workshop organized in the context of the EU-funded Patient Safety through Intelligent Procedures in medication (PSIP) project and held in 2011 in Paris. The workshop provides an opportunity for experts active in the field to share ideas and experiences arising from many different perspectives. The 29 papers address current, novel methods and applications which have achieved concrete results and are relevant to the domain of patient safety as a whole, and are grouped into four main sections: designing IT systems for patient safety; methods and technologies for developing patient safety systems; novel applications to validate patient safety informatics and impact assessment studies for patient safety informatics outcomes. Significant progress has been made in the field, but even greater challenges must still be faced if a successful transfer of research ideas and outcomes into clinical practice is to be accomplished. A new focus in healthcare IT is called for; one which specifically addresses the issue of patient safety.