There's nothing like a tragic patient safety error to vault your hospital onto the front page of your local--or worse; national--newspaper. So why don't more hospitals employ technology that can help prevent needless errors?
Take, for example, the use of radio-frequency identification (RFID) in healthcare organizations. About 31 percent of health IT professionals say that widespread use of RFID applications can directly impact patient safety--such as through patient identification, counting surgical sponges and improving medication safety--but only 16 percent say their hospital uses RFID to promote patient safety. The findings come from a HIMSS report based on a May 2010 survey of 222 health IT professionals.
Instead, RFID gets the most use in areas that aren't directly linked to patient care, such as to track equipment and manage inventory. Sure, it makes sense from an ROI standpoint to use RFID technology in this way, but it sounds like many hospital leaders--IT and otherwise--are missing a real life-saving opportunity.
To learn more:
- read the article in iHealthBeat
- check out the original report in HIMSS Vantage Point