Nurse informaticists should take a look at ANIA’s position
statement, “Addressing the Safety of Electronic Health
Records.” They should be collaborating with their global director
of patient safety so they’re not kept in a separate space. They
should ask, “Does our incident reporting system have a way to
catch health IT related events?” What is their strategy for looking
at health IT related safety events? We really need to learn from the
events. Part of the problem is that sometimes we don’t know about
them because they don’t get reported. How do we encourage
people to report incidents so we can learn from them? One of
the ways is making it as easy as possible to enter the event. It
needs to be as simple as just hitting a button that says “Report” and
then filling it out. Then a program needs to be put together with
your coordinator of safety on how you are going to review those
reports, and, just as important, how you are going to communicate
with the person who submitted it.