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- Published on: 31 December 2018
- Published on: 31 December 2018Health technology: boon or bane?
I read this paper1 first published on 5 March 2018 in your journal with great interest.
The great pace of health information technology (health IT) advancement in recent decades held promise in improving patient safety and quality of care, but unfortunately there has since been inadvertent consequences and carry-over effects of technology-related safety concerns in its use and implementation.2 This paper has further fuelled the boon or bane debate of health IT.3
Ironically, the implementation of a national, multifaceted, quality improvement (QI) programme of ‘de-implementing’ electronic health record (EHR) notifications to primary care physicians (PCPs) has shown some benefit.1 This has, in some way, proven that being too reliant on technology in healthcare may yet rear its ugly head.
The paper has shown that high volume of EHR notifications can overwhelm PCPs;1 the proposed measure of breaking these down into “low-value” and “high-value”, and enforcing certain mandatory ones, may merely be an intermediate stopgap technique. Determining which is which, by its nature, is difficult to do and standardise.
Further, implementing a nationwide programme such as this poses certain challenges that the authors have not considered – will there be a difference between urban and rural healthcare facilities in its implementation, given resource limitations?4 Will technology have improved or changed by the time this programme is fully implemented nationwide?...
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None declared.