Health IT Safety Plan Announced

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology announces the publication of the final version of the Health IT Patient Safety Action and Surveillance Plan (“Health IT Safety Plan” or “Plan”).  The Plan builds on recommendations of the 2011 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, Health IT and Patient Safety: Building Safer Systems for Better Care, and provides a roadmap for increasing knowledge of health IT safety and ensuring that health IT is used to make care safer. The Plan leverages existing authorities to strengthen patient safety efforts across government programs and the private sector—including health care providers, health IT developers, patient safety organizations (PSOs), and accrediting and oversight bodies. 

AHRQ will be working together with ONC to:

• Collaborate with PSOs, providers, and developers to add a focus of health IT to their collection, aggregation, analysis, and mitigation of  providers’ adverse event reports. AHRQ will also provide guidance to PSOs on how they can work with EHR developers to identify and mitigate health IT risks.
• Provide tools and resources to help providers identify, describe, and report health IT-related events and hazards.
• Support the research and development of tools and guidance for using health IT to improve safety and mitigate health IT safety risks.
• Begin development of Common Formats for ambulatory care that will enhance reporting of health IT events outside the hospital.

More information about the Plan and its implementation is available at http://www.healthit.gov/policy-researchers-implementers/health-it-and-patient-safety

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