European Commission releases new study on the impact of ICT on patient safety and risk management

Published: 09/28

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM - (HealthTech Wire) - Citizens are at the very centre of health services across the European Union. Enabling and supporting them to stay healthy is the optimal way to foster patient safety. Improving the access, quality, and effectiveness of healthcare provided is a second best, but equally crucial means, whether the care is chronic or acute, whether the patient is eight months, eight years, or eighty years old.

Towards the end of the last century, many years of seminal clinical research finally alerted the public to the deplorable state of patient safety, and the preventable harm and even death citizens experience when being treated. This triggered global attention to the potential risks that patients run when they have an encounter with their health system. In Europe, we have observed the development of this concern closely. Avoiding unnecessary suffering has become a high priority of health policies.

eHealth, the beneficial application of ICT-based systems and solutions, has been identified as potentially the key enabler to fundamentally improve patient safety in clinical contexts. This is why the European Commission launched the eHealth for Safety study at the beginning of 2006. It will help European policy-makers, and particularly research policy decision-makers, to understand more completely the potential role of information and communications technology (ICT) in making European patients’ experiences more safe, sound, and secure. The study’s contribution is to enrich the comprehensiveness of our knowledge of how ICT tools can help. More specifically, we need to know how European research support programmes can contribute to improve patient safety.

The study findings help put flesh on this challenge. Firstly, it shows us what ICT applications are being implemented today in practice. Policy-makers are always on the lookout for good practice. Leading examples in the field of eHealth for safety appear to be emerging across many, if not all Member States, albeit often only in specific settings and not across the entire healthcare domain. Such cases of good ICT practice are well worth further exploration, and examination of the transferability of their experiences to other regional and national settings.

Secondly, it reminds us that any field, however, must be well-grounded in empirical research, and this is equally true of eHealth for Safety. Specific examples of possible ICT applications for future exploration and assessment in terms of their impact on patient safety include electronic health and care record systems in support for personalised care, wearable systems, micro- and nano-devices, bio-medically based diagnostics, home-based or mobile telemedicine, and knowledge management and decision support systems.

Finally, these days groundbreaking knowledge development in any subject predominantly occurs in multi-disciplinary and interactive settings. The eHealth for Safety domain has especially benefited from the exchange of information among eminent international researchers and practitioners. Facilitated by European Union Research Support Programmes, we are pleased to see leading European researchers and practitioners come together with their counterparts internationally from countries like Australia, Canada, China, New Zealand or the United States of America to analyse and debate the successes and challenges of eHealth in patient safety research and implementation.

As a result of such dialogue, and the compilation of core research and implementation ideas, we hope very much to consider the further development of some of the visions developed in this report in the future directions to be taken by European research and development.

The report can be downloaded from this website: ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/health/publications/index_en.htm

This report will be a good support to discussions of the different sessions around Patient Safety at The World of Health IT 2007 in Vienna, Austria. (e.g. ES31, ES36 or ES42).