HLT-313V Topic 3 DQ 2

Looking ahead, select one area of the current National Patient Safety Goals program and make a prediction as to what might change in that area based on technological or other advancements. Consider patient identification standards, communication processes, and infection control protocols, among others.
You are required to use and cite a minimum of two references to support your response.

Solution

Patient identification is an area that can evolve in one critical area of the National Patient Safety Goals (NPSGs): At present (Joint Commission, 2020), the Joint Commission calls for the use of at least two patient identifiers (for example name and date of birth) to mitigate misidentification errors. These days, as technology develops, the use of biometric authentication and artificial intelligence (AI) will become more and more important in strengthening patient safety.

This is currently being used in some health care systems to eliminate errors in patients’ identity matching (Mishra et al., 2021). As the cost and implementation of this technology continues to decline with increasing use, the Joint Commission may either mandate or encourage its use as the primary patient identifier.

In addition, hip AI driven algorithms are better at patient matching in an electronic health record (EHR) that helps to minimize duplicate records and reduce the chance that the patient could be confused (Grannis et al., 2018). The NPSGs may in future incorporate AI assisted verification methods to improve the accuracy of patient data which is mostly accurate in large health networks and least accurate in other networks due to misidentification that persists.

Looking forward, as these technologies continue to grow, patient identification methods that are less secure and less automated will no longer be the norm, and will instead become new safety standard that will minimize human error and increase overall patient outcomes.

References
Grannis, S. J., Xu, H., Vest, J. R., Kasthurirathne, S. N., & Vaidya, S. R. (2019). Evaluating the effect of data standardization and validation on patient matching accuracy. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 26(5), 447–456. https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocy191

Joint Commission. (2020). National patient safety goals effective January 2020. Retrieved from https://www.jointcommission.org/standards/national-patient-safety-goals

Mishra, B., Mishra, S., & Sahoo, B. K. (2021). Biometric authentication in healthcare: Current trends and future prospects. Healthcare Technology Letters, 8(3), 56–65. https://doi.org/10.1049/htl2.12017

This question has been answered.

Order Now