Voluntary guidelines designed to increase the safety of electronic health records (EHRs) have yet to be implemented fully, according to a survey published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
Researchers—led by Dean Sittig, PhD, a professor at the UTHealth School Biomedical Informatics—conducted a follow-up survey to see how many healthcare organizations fully implemented the Safety Assurance Factors for EHR Resilience (SAFER) guides.
The guidelines were released in 2014 to help health systems conduct proactive risk assessment of EHR safety in several areas. The guide provided 140 recommendations separated into nine guides, according to a press release from UTHealth.
Eight healthcare organizations in the United States and Australia conducted a self-assessment on how the guidelines have been implemented. The study found that the sites only fully implemented 25 out of the 140 recommendations—or about 18 percent.
“Despite availability of recommendations on how to improve use of EHRs, most recommendations were not fully implemented. New national policy initiatives are needed to stimulate implementation of these best practices,” the study said.
The results were divided into three domains: safe health IT, using health IT safely and monitoring health IT. Recommendations associated with the safe health IT domain had the highest adherence rate, followed by the using health safely and monitoring health IT domains.
“This is not surprising because the domains were conceived as sequential building blocks,” Sittig said in the release. “The safe health IT domain contains many recommendations required for [EHR] system certification.”
Danielle covers Clinical Innovation & Technology as a senior news writer for TriMed Media. Previously, she worked as a news reporter in northeast Missouri and earned a journalism degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She's also a huge fan of the Chicago Cubs, Bears and Bulls.