Using Machine Learning, Health IT to Improve Patient Safety

Across the care continuum, all healthcare organizations are continuously seeking new and innovative ways to improve patient safety. Medication errors, hospital-acquired conditions, and preventable deaths have always topped the list of events to avoid, and as artificial intelligence and machine learning have crept into each part of the industry, health systems have started leveraging these tools to learn from past patient safety incidents. “For quite some time, our team has been really focused on developing more intuitive, advanced, and scalable ways of analyzing patient safety event data,” Raj Ratwani, PhD, director of the MedStar Health National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare, told HealthITAnalytics.com. “Most healthcare systems across the country collect this information. If it’s used well, the data can help organizations identify safety hazards, and then remedy those safety hazards quickly. But we've seen that people don't always have the necessary tools and skills to analyze all that data.”