Myth 1: Computerized physician order entry (CPOE) alone can improve patient safety. While CPOE has been helpful minimizing errors associated with medication orders, it is only one piece of the overall patient safety solution. Health care executives should consider how their technology supports safety across the entire enterprise. Myth 2: My vendor understands patient safety. Patient safety is still a relatively new discipline. Unfortunately there are very few individuals who understand the key issues of and approaches for patient safety, and can match that with experience to make it relevant for you and your health system. Myth 3: Return on investment (ROI) is the reason to address patient safety. Don't build your ROI based on safety alone. Consider investing in technology as a way to achieve high performance by improving patient safety while it enhances your bottom line in other ways. Myth 4: Implementing an advanced clinical system will mean layoffs. No clinical system contains enough information to replace human decision making, nor will these systems reach that level of functionality in their product lifetimes. Myth 5: If we build it, they will come. Trying to bring physicians on board after a clinical system has been selected and implemented is a common and, quite often, costly mistake. Do not expect anyone to "heal your pain" if you take a step that affects your medical and nursing staffs without their involvement and participation up front. Myth 6: Everyone else has a patient safety problem—except us. When surveyed, most health care leaders believe that patient safety is a major issue in the United States—but not at their facility. Myth 7: Benchmarking will define where we should start improving safety. We are still early in our development of advanced reporting systems for capturing medical errors. If you rely on existing and incomplete benchmarking data, it may hurt—and not help—your efforts. Myth 8: Patient safety requires a new corporate department. If you want to make lasting change in your organization, patient safety should be part of the organizational "genome" where it becomes an integral part of the organizational fabric in everything you do. Myth 9: It's OK to store almost all of our patient data on an outpatient system because that is how most receive care. Though a patient experiences the majority of care as an outpatient, storing rich patient data on an outpatient system that cannot be extended into an inpatient or long-term care system creates a major gap through which safety issues are likely to arise. Myth 10: Most medication errors occur at the order writing stage of the process. Not all health care organizations do the same processes the same way, and often there are many variations of the same processes within an organization. Therefore, published reports from other health care organizations about where errors occur may not apply to yours. Return to Summary |