You expect your care to be safe when you enter a hospital, and for most people it is. However, a small portion of patients experience some type of unintended harm as a result of the care they receive. These are known as medical errors. In Canada, preventable medical errors account for approximately 17,000 to 23,000 deaths every year. This is the third leading cause of death in Canada—behind only cancer and heart disease.
This issue is not isolated to Canada, either. In the United States, Johns Hopkins Medicine conducted a study that suggests medical errors account for approximately 250,000 deaths each year. Although Canada and the United States are both first-world countries with some of the highest standards of living, medical-error related deaths still plague care facilities today.
However, this isn’t inherently due to poor care providers with lack of training. There are underlying issues that need to be addressed systemically. With ever-increasing expectations to provide higher-quality documentation and more detailed reports, care providers need to allocate more time from their busy days to tackle these duties. These medical professionals juggle several tasks while treating multiple patients with each patient requiring the same level of care and attention. As a result, the risk of medical error increases.
The current pandemic has compounded these issues in the world as the supply of readily available medical professionals continues to fall while the need for care rises. Many care providers have children who are no longer in school due to the pandemic and whom now require supervision. Lack of available childcare can prevent some staff members from attending their shifts. Medical facilities with high-risk patients, such as the elderly in a retirement home or individuals with compromised immune systems, require greater measures to protect those around them. This means sending medical staff home to self-isolate if they have worked in another facility with a positive case. This leaves a seemingly insurmountable workload to be picked up by the remaining care providers.
It is important to acknowledge that all frontline medical professionals continue to risk their own health to maintain the health of Canadians. Earlier this month, World Health Day was a day to remind us of all the work they put forth every day. If you would like to read more about the great work our frontline workers are doing, click here.
While it may seem that medical professionals can handle even the most difficult tasks, they are after all only human. Medical errors are imminent if tasks continue to pile onto a care provider’s already-full list of things to do. A solution needs to be set in place to mitigate these tasks and ease the medical professionals’ daily work systemically.
Medical errors, while prominent in every care facility, can be mitigated and/or prevented by providing the necessary tools frontline medical staff need to handle their work in a streamlined and efficient manner. Access eHealth is rapidly accelerating the development of our AccessEMR software to provide medical professionals with the tools they need to significantly streamline their daily workflow. This will save time that can be reallocated towards improving patient care, and more importantly, reducing the number of medical errors that occur. For example, the AccessEMR platform features several checks and balances built right into the application to ensure your loved one is not being given a prescription that conflicts with another drug.
Our focus at Access eHealth is to provide solutions for the most vulnerable segment within our population – our seniors and the elderly. If you would like to learn more about Access eHealth Technologies’ products HomeCare and Nursing Home, and the problems that we aim to solve, please click here.