Healthcare Hazards From Devices and Systems Drive New Patient-Safety Concerns
By Kelly M. Pyrek
COVID-19 supply chain shortages and other PPE- and device-related risks are part of independent non-profit organization ECRI’s annual Top 10 Health Technology Hazards for 2022.
ECRI’s report, now in its 15th year, identifies health technology concerns that warrant attention by healthcare leaders. ECRI’s team of biomedical engineers, clinicians, and healthcare management experts follows a rigorous review process to select topics for the annual list, drawing insight from incident investigations, reporting databases, and independent medical device testing.
Robert Schluth, project officer, device evaluation team at ECRI, acknowledges that technology is helping drive the increasing complexity of the healthcare sector. “Information technology (IT), particularly, is playing a significant role, but it's also the way that healthcare technology has evolved, because more systems are interconnected and relying on IT-based systems can complicate processes. A problem that originates in one system may pop up downstream somewhere through a connected system, so it gets trickier to tease out those obstacles. In general, medical devices are better than they were 30 years ago in terms of the quality of the manufacturing and functionality, but on the other hand, some of the complexities create new challenges for healthcare technology managers.”
Schluth points out that even in a systems-driven environment, the individual – whether it’s a clinician or biomedical engineer – has a critical role in monitoring for healthcare hazards that can jeopardize patient safety.
“One point that we highlight with some of the ancillary materials that we distributed with the Top 10 Health Technology Hazards report this year is the importance of reporting problems,” he says. “Frontline healthcare personnel, anyone in the healthcare environment, or even patients could be key to identifying that something could be wrong and following up on the issue. Sometimes it might seem like an innocuous thing, but when you track down what was really going on, it could be a sign of a larger problem. The reason we must be alert to hazards is to try to prevent any harm in the first place. So, effective and timely problem-reporting is a great way to do that. Healthcare professionals must know what's going on, investigate problems and fix things before they affect patients and other personnel.”
Read further from the February 2022 issue HERE