ONC Introduces Tools for Safer EHR Use

A new set of guides and interactive tools to help health care providers more safely use electronic HIT products, such as EHRs, are now available at HealthIT.gov.  

ONC recently released the Safety Assurance Factors for EHR Resilience (SAFER) Guides. These guides are a suite of tools that include checklists and recommended practices designed to help health care providers and the organizations that support them assess and optimize the safety and safe use of EHRs.  

The release of the SAFER Guides marks an important milestone in the implementation of the HHS Health IT Patient Safety Action and Surveillance Plan, which was issued in July 2013. The SAFER Guides complement existing HIT safety tools and research developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and ONC. AHRQ’s Patient Safety Organizations (PSO) have explicitly identified HIT as a high priority area because of the enormous impact EHRs are having on patient safety right now. PSOs are charged to help their members improve patient safety, and the SAFER Guides give them an evidence-based tool to do so.

Rigorously developed by leading HIT safety and informatics researchers and based on the latest available evidence, expert opinion, stakeholder engagement, and field work, each SAFER Guide addresses a critical area associated with the safe use of EHRs through a series of self-assessment checklists, practice worksheets, and recommended practices. Areas addressed include the following:

• high priority practices;
• organizational responsibilities;
• patient identification;
• computerized physician order entry with decision support;
• test results review and follow-up;
• clinician communication;
• contingency planning;
• system interfaces; and
• system configuration.
  

Each SAFER Guide has extensive references and is available as a downloadable PDF and as an interactive Web-based tool.

The SAFER Guides are available at http://www.HealthIT.gov/saferguide.  

Source: Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology