Technology and safety are intertwined, encompassing cybersecurity, infection control, EHRs, and credentialing. Patient Safety Awareness Week, from 10–16 March, 2024, promotes healthcare safety awareness. Seeking insights from experts, I inquire: How can new HealthTech advancements improve patient safety during critical care and routine healthcare? Let’s start by looking at a few companies utilising technology to improve patient safety.
Medallion launches accurate one-day credentialing solution
Medallion, a leader in end-to-end credentialing and provider network management solutions, announced its one-day credentialing solution for healthcare organisations that accurately and quickly transforms the credentialing process.
“Medallion’s one-day credentialing solution is transforming the healthcare industry as we know it,” said Caitie Barrett, Senior Director of Credentialing at Medallion. “Credentialing is a critical part of patient safety. We’ve seen far too many times organisations attempt to be the fastest and, as a result, sacrifice accuracy. Now’s the time we move past just speed and toward a credentialing gold standard of speed and accuracy, which is exactly what Medallion offers.”
Medallion’s one-day credentialing solution offers automation that reduces the credentialing turnaround time while maintaining the highest levels of accuracy, including:
- Instant Primary Source Verifications (PSVs): Gives automatic results and flags non-compliant providers with as few as five provider data points.
- Automated Quality Assurance (QA): Reviews all PSV evidence to ensure it accurately matches a provider’s profile.
- NCQA Compliance: Built to enforce all NCQA requirements and track and flag missing elements such as data and verifications.
Regard and Kettering Health Hamilton partner to streamline EHR navigation
Regard, a leading AI clinical platform, has announced a partnership with Kettering Health Hamilton to implement their groundbreaking EHR-based technology that analyses the entirety of the medical record and streamlines navigation for busy clinicians.
Regard’s technology helps solve one of the biggest problems within health systems: the constant balancing act for physicians to find the time to treat their patients and simultaneously complete necessary administrative tasks. The company’s AI automatically and securely reviews each patient’s EHR, curating and uniquely recommending diagnoses to improve patient safety.
Some examples of the way Regard benefits both clinicians and patients include:
- Improved diagnosing – Regard drives patient safety by reviewing all data to ensure vital diagnoses don’t get overlooked or spotted too late like sepsis, atrial fibrillation, acute kidney injury, or chronic conditions.
- Improved care transitions — Regard’s technology ensures continuity during handoffs, providing clinicians with all of the relevant details needed to get up-to-speed quickly.
- Medication safety – Regard ensures medications are accurate, preventing mistakes like accidentally discontinued meds or double-dosing.
BD reaffirms its commitment to advancing patient safety
BD unites with the global healthcare community in championing Patient Safety emphasising the pivotal role of healthcare professionals, medical technology companies in addition to patients and their families, in ensuring unwavering patient care and safety.
“Patient safety is a core value that knows no boundaries, especially in the MENAT region,” said Maher Elhassan, Vice President and General Manager of BD MENAT. “BD serves as a dedicated partner to healthcare providers and patients, motivated by an unwavering focus on enhancing patient lives. Our goal is unequivocal: to raise standards of safety, decrease the risks associated with medical errors, and bolster the ongoing resilience of healthcare.”
Jon Pickering, CEO of Mizaic
HealthTech advancements hold immense promise in enhancing patient safety across critical care and routine healthcare settings, especially as we mark Patient Safety Awareness Week. At the core of these innovations lies a fundamental commitment to safeguarding patients from unintended harm while receiving medical care.
Central to this mission is the seamless integration of HealthTech solutions designed to prioritise patient safety at every turn. From ensuring the utmost security of digital information to equipping clinicians with comprehensive insights into patient conditions, these advancements play a pivotal role in optimising care delivery.
One pressing challenge facing healthcare today is the management of vast volumes of unstructured information and physical paper-based medical records. At our company, we’ve made it a priority to address this issue head-on with our cutting-edge electronic document management system (EDMS), MediViewer.
MediViewer isn’t just about data security and accessibility; it’s about empowering clinicians with a holistic view of a patient’s medical history precisely when it matters most—at the point of care. This comprehensive understanding enables healthcare providers to make informed, timely decisions regarding diagnosis and treatment, thereby safeguarding patient safety.
Traditional paper-based record-keeping methods pose inherent risks, including loss, damage and unauthorised access, all of which can compromise patient safety. In contrast, EDMS solutions like MediViewer offer a secure, centralised platform for storing and managing patient records, mitigating these vulnerabilities and ensuring data integrity.
Key features of MediViewer, such as robust audit trails and adherence to regulatory standards, further enhance the security and accountability of patient data management. These features not only facilitate transparency and traceability but also instil confidence in both healthcare providers and patients regarding the privacy and protection of their information.
Moreover, MediViewer streamlines access to patient records, improving the quality and efficiency of care delivery while minimising the potential for errors associated with manual record-keeping processes. Advanced functionalities like data encryption and user authentication fortify the security of patient information against cyber threats, safeguarding patient safety in an increasingly digital healthcare landscape.
In essence, the adoption of MediViewer represents a proactive step towards ensuring patient safety in today’s digitised healthcare environment. By leveraging HealthTech advancements to augment information accessibility and security, we uphold our commitment to providing safe, high-quality care to every patient, every time.
Dr Simon Sinclair, Chief Medical Officer, Ondine Biomedical
A critical aspect of patient safety is the reduction of preventable infections in healthcare settings. Healthcare-associated infections (HAI) are causing increasing concern across the world as rising rates of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) mean that we can no longer rely on many of our most powerful antibiotics to effectively treat infections.
If we continue to overuse antibiotics and allow rates of AMR to rise unchecked, we risk returning to a time when we were vulnerable to even the simplest infections. Economic and regulatory obstacles have also meant that the development of new antibiotics has stagnated: the World Health Organization has said that the antibiotic pipeline we have is inadequate to address the growing threat of AMR.
A type of HAI called surgical site infections (SSIs) is of particular concern to healthcare systems because they are potentially fatal and very costly to treat, often requiring re-operation. A high proportion of SSIs are caused by bacteria of nasal origin, including Staphylococcus aureus and Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). These and other pathogens can migrate from the nose to a surgical incision site and cause an infection. Although there is growing awareness of the need to eliminate these pathogens before surgery to prevent SSIs, fears about overusing antibiotics mean that not all patients are being treated.
Luckily, HealthTech has been able to succeed where traditional drug development is failing. New technologies are bringing viable alternatives to antibiotics, crucially without triggering the development of AMR. The leading technology emerging right now is light-activated antimicrobial therapy. This uses a specific wavelength of red light to trigger chemical reactions that are rapidly fatal to infection-causing bacteria, viruses and fungi. Mid Yorkshire NHS Teaching Trust is currently using Ondine Biomedical’s light-activated antimicrobial technology to eliminate pathogens in the nose before high-risk orthopaedic surgery. Because this technology is not a traditional antibiotic, it can be used on all patients without leading to increased resistance. In time, this technology will find applications to prevent and treat many more types of infection, further sparing our reliance on traditional antibiotics.
Prof. Ashley George, Global Non Executive Director/Adviser in healthcare
It is commonly thought that health literacy is a contributing factor to on-going patient safety. Patient engagement and research has been conducted and is on-going across many different geographies and approaches, however, one specific article highlights the diversity in health literacy and its direct impact on our health delivery ecosystems particularly well.
A 2022 publication by Squires et al investigated and concluded that home health patients with a non-English language preference had a higher hospital readmission risk than English speaking patients. In fact, the analysed dataset comprised 90,221 post-hospitalisation patients and 6.5 million home health care visits and showed that the readmission rate for the limited English proficiency patients was 20.4% overall compared to 18.5% for English speakers. Clearly delivering directly to the patient/carer relevant information in a consumable format, language and digital engagement framework that they can actively engage with is key to this on-going change. Whether it is directly related to patient and/or carer safety, as and when they undertake medication, or via a means for safety via an understand and knowledge of the safety associated with prevention, or around a better understanding and engagement with their condition.
Yet as an industry we’ve been wrestling with this issue for a while, as the years and on-going research has shown us. Surely, we can do better and there is an ever-growing and pressing need for different radical approaches to health literacy and engagement with patients and carers related to their health and safety, whether around medication, prevention strategies, etc.
Several organisations are looking to tackle this clamouring need, and some are going beyond the traditional approaches of certified translations, which, after all, assume your level of health literacy is simply that you can read to a good enough understanding. After all, the widely quoted US$236 billion annual cost to the US healthcare system, due to inadequate health literacy, with approximately 36% of US adults (77 million people) having basic or below basic health literacy.
Some organisations stand out by taking non-traditional approaches. One such organisation is Read-It-To-Me which is looking to tackle this at a global level with a hugely different approach to engage with citizens, as the company is looking to leave a legacy rather than build a unicorn. Not only is it already globally available to 5.4 billion people, in 140+ languages with 400+ accents, but it is also not another app or a website that clutters patients’ and carers’ experiences, and rather places health content safely and securely where real citizens live their digital lives.
The team behind Read-It-To-Me appreciates that not everything is or needs to be smart, and as such vital patient health information and the information related to patient safety, and therefore information, is narrated and is also delivered by good old SMS. This allows the direct to patient/carer/citizen services to be consumer accessible irrespective of not only language and health literacy but also digital literacy, and thus starts to close the gap between health literacy and empowering the patient and carer to understand the health aspects associated with patient safety.