Statistics
The below statistics and sources outline the current situation and causes that lead to patient harm and disengagement of clinical staff with existing Electronic Patient Records (EPRs) and nursing systems:
Clinical Errors:
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24% of UK hospital deaths are preventable, and 9,000 deaths annually are caused by poor care
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The NHS wastes at least £1bn annually on avoidable errors
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Strategies to reduce the rate of adverse events in the EU alone, would lead to the prevention of more than 750,000 harm-inflicting medical errors per year, leading in turn to over 3.2 million fewer days of hospitalization, 260,000 fewer incidents of permanent disability, and 95,000 fewer deaths per year.
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50% to 70.2% of such harm can be prevented through comprehensive
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systematic approaches to patient safety
Related factors leading to patient harm:
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inadequate processes and procedures
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disruptions in workflow and care coordination
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issues related to health information systems, such as problems with electronic health records
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communication breakdown among health care workers, within health care teams
Donaldson (2014) investigated 2,010 fatalities in UK hospitals over a 2-year period and found that ~70% of these were due to fragmented processes. InCare will contribute to significant prevention in the below 4 categories:
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deterioration mismanagement- (cause for 35% of investigated critical incidents)
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prevention failure- (26%)
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deficient checking/oversight- (11%)
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dysfunctional patient flow- (10%)
Challenges that nurse face with current EPRs:
Park & Marquard (2024), highlight that:
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existing nursing systems are incomplete and fail to “adequately support the cognitive aspects of nurses’ work”
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nursing systems have “the potential to support nursing workflow by providing a concise and easy-to-synthesize summary of a patient’s information, but current design does not fulfil that ideal”
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“although nurses are key users of EHRs, their involvement in the design
process is still underrepresented compared to physicians”.
Also, research reveals that Nurse face documentation challenges with current nursing modules within existing EPRs due to:
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poor design and usability
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working with hybrid (paper and electronic) systems requiring complex workflows
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duplicate data entry
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multiple system login
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difficulty in finding the ‘patient story’ or specific patient information
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propagation of errors throughout the record
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too many alerts
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poor navigation
These result in increased documentation times, reduced nursing engagement and
poor nursing satisfaction.
Sources:
Sponsors and supporters