Bedside Technology Improves Patient Safety
Graduation Date
1-2011
Document Type
Master's Thesis
Document Form
Degree Name
Master of Science
Department
Nursing
Thesis Advisor
Barbara Ganley, PhD, RN, HNC
Abstract
Background: Much new technology is available to support patient safety in the hospital including bar scanning identification methods for medications and patients, electronic medical records, etc. However, when the technology is not properly utilized it may increase the risk to the patient rather than reducing it. Circumventing the process of scanning bar code medication labels or workarounds has increased significantly since the implementation of hospital based bar coding technology. This has also caused an increased concern for patient safety. Objectives: To ensure that all nurses have completed the electronic health record training. To identify barriers and challenges with equipment and to assess why do overrides occur. Methods: Mixed methods were used in this project. Interviews and data collection through the Kaiser Permanent Quality database system called Statit-piMD was used. Statit-piMD is a health quality and clinical process improvement software that measure, monitor and optimizes. piMD is performance improvement management dashboard that analyze, compare, contrast and track raw data that provide an objective decisions to reduce cost and make quality decisions better.
Results: The organizational target goal is 5% for overrides. The 5-West unit percentage ranges from zero to a little higher than 2%, which is less than the target set by the regional office. This means 2% of the time overrides occur with administration of medications. This percentage is considered too high to the unit despite the regional goal of 5%. The total percentage over one-year is 26.2% with 64 actual spikes and valleys. This results in mean = 0.41 % or less 1.0% of overrides. This is significantly less than the regional target of 5% and impressively denotes that override administration of medication occurs less than 1% over a one year period.