Information and Communication Technology

Many ICTs are designed to help facilitate patient safety, including various systems that mandate positive patient identification (e.g., electronic medication administration)(Paoletti et al., 2007) and help standardize triage Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale (CTAS) scores for assessed patients in emergency departments (McLeod et al., 2018).

While no clinical record approach or process (paper or electronic) is perfect in terms of facilitating all aspects of patient safety, the introduction of ICT to clinical environments can sometimes generate situations where unintended consequences occur. Therefore, it is  important to understand the interaction of humans with elements of an ICT system (i.e., human factors) and how these interactions can generate ‘unintended outcomes’ (Gephart et al., 2015), including the development of clinical workarounds or even poorly designed systems.  The next slide will attempt to outline why workflow, process, and human factors are important in the development and implementation of ICT.