Study: Integrating patient safety features in EHRs proves challenging

“Designing, implementing, and evaluating a suite of tools integrated within a vendor EHR to improve patient safety has a variety of challenges.” That’s the conclusion of researchers evaluating a Patient Safety Learning Laboratories (PSLL) project on 12 inpatient units at a large academic medical center. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality began funding PSLLs in 2014. The intervention uses collaborative approaches to incorporate digital health tools into electronic health records (EHRs) to improve patient safety. The goal is to engage “patients, families and the care team in identifying, assessing and reducing threats to patient safety in real time through EHR integration,” the authors wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.