Automated detection of health IT failures
Centre for health informatics
Research stream
Project members
Dr Didi Surian
Dr YIng Wang
Professor Farah Magrabi
Professor Enrico Coiera
Project contact
Dr Didi Surian
E: didi.surian@mq.edu.au
Project main description
Health information technology (IT) can play an important role in supporting care delivery and improving patient safety. Alongside the many benefits, problems with health IT can introduce new, often unforeseen, modes of failure that affect the safety and quality of clinical care and may lead to patient harm and death. Risks to patients can arise from problems with the health IT systems themselves, the way they are implemented and how they are used. Unlike other risks to patient safety, health IT problems can—because of their scale and scope—increase the risk of harm to many patients during the delivery of health services. Current approaches to detecting health IT problems are primarily based on clinicians reports which usually appear well after the fact and are not directly actionable. Many health IT problems thus go undetected or are detected only after patients have been harmed.
One way to minimise the impact of health IT problems is by proactively monitoring systems in real-time using automated methods to detect problems in the quality and availability of clinical data, before care is disrupted or patients are harmed.
The goals of this project are:
- To identify existing automated methods, their use, and limitations in detecting health IT problems
- To develop automated methods for surveillance of health IT problems
References
- Wang Y, Coiera E, Gallego B, Concha OP, Ong MS, Tsafnat G, et al. Measuring the effects of computer downtime on hospital pathology processes. Journal of biomedical informatics. 2016;59:308-15.
- Chen J, Wang Y, Magrabi F. Downtime in Digital Hospitals: An Analysis of Patterns and Causes Over 33 Months. Stud Health Technol Inform 2017. p. 14-20.
- Ong, M.-S., F. Magrabi, and E. Coiera, Syndromic surveillance for health information system failures: a feasibility study. J Am Med Inform Assoc, 2013. 20: p. 506-512. [doi: 10.1136/amiajnl-2012-001144]
Project sponsors
- The National Health and Medical Research Council Centre for Research Excellence in Digital Health (APP1134919)
Related projects
- Classifying patient safety incidents involving digital health
- Automated identification of reports about patient safety incidents
Project status
Current
Centres related to this project
Content owner: Australian Institute of Health Innovation Last updated: 11 Mar 2024 7:22pm