Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns Include Lab Related Issues

By Kelly A. Briganti, Editorial Director, G2 Intelligence

Four of the top 10 patient safety concerns, compiled from reports of more than 1.2 million safety events, literature review and expert opinion, have relevance for laboratories and diagnostics. ECRI Institute’s third annual Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for Healthcare Organizations 2016 includes “real things that are happening,” stated Associate Director for the ECRI Institute PSO, Catherine Pusey, RN, MBA, in the Executive Summary. They aren’t the most frequently cited or the most severe issues, added Bill Marella, MBA, MMI, ECRI’s executive director, PSO operations and analytics. “We’re trying to pick out the things that are relatively novel or that are not necessarily new but are manifesting themselves in a new way because of changes in the healthcare system.”

Labs will find most relevant the safety issue appearing at number five on ECRI’s list: Inadequate Test-Result Reporting and Follow-up. Factors that affect test reporting safety issues included inadequate communication among providers and failure to follow-up on test results and their health implications with and by patients.

Other items on ECRI’s top 10 of relevance to labs include:

• Number one: “Health IT configurations and organizational workflows that do not support each other”—meaning that operationally, people don’t adjust to new IT systems.
• Number two: patient identification errors—which ECRI notes have “broad implications” and “serious consequences.” For discussion of patient identification issues relevant to the laboratory see National Intelligence Report, 2/11/16, p. 1.
• Number nine: inadequate antimicrobial stewardship—diagnostics play a key role in the fight against antibiotic resistance with the federal government’s Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria (CARB) National Action Plan looking to “advance the development of diagnostics to detect antimicrobial resistance.”
• Number 10: failure to embrace a culture of safety.

For further discussion of these patient safety issues and ECRI’s list, see the April 29 issue of National Intelligence Report.