UBIQUITOUS ACCESS:
ON THE FRONT LINES OF
PATIENT CARE
AND SAFETY
UA initiatives help allay potentially fatal errors, improve
patient safety, and boost overall quality of care.
The U.S. Institute of Medicine has reported
that nearly 98,000 people die each year due
to medical errors, such as incorrect medication dosages due to poor legibility in manual
records, or delays in consolidating needed
information to discern the proper intervention [ 6]. Many of these grievous mistakes
could almost certainly be avoided with
faster, more comprehensive, more accessible
patient documentation at the point of care
[ 6]. Fortunately, institutions are beginning
to recognize the fact that employing point-of-care information technology (IT) can
increase patient safety and reduce medical
errors [ 12]. In light of these concerns and a
severe nurse shortage (an estimated 400,000
shortage by 2020 exacerbated by overwhelming administrative tasks, like laborious manual documentation requirements),
an increasing number of hospitals are implementing ubiquitous access [ 7]. The aim is to
reduce caregiver error, streamline convoluted processes, and ease nurse administra-
tive workloads by providing readily available
access to enter and retreive current complete
patient information when and where most
needed—at the point of care [ 5, 7].
In our research, we examined the use of
ubiquitous access (UA) to medical and
patient information via mobile information
communication technologies (MICTs) by
hospital nurses, because they are at the front
lines of care and safety. Overtaxed nurses
assume even more responsibilities, and the
impending nurse crisis may endanger
patients if nurses are belabored with antiquated methods of information acquisition
(such as hastily handwriting notes or entering information into a computer away from
the point of care—both error-prone and
labor-intensive procedures) [ 7].
Sixty-two percent of respondents from a
survey of 100 U.S. health care IT decision
makers cited wireless enablement of the clinical documentation process as a top priority
between 2004 and 2006 [ 3]. However, IT
BY CHON ABRAHAM, RICHARD THOMAS WATSON,
AND MARIE-CLAUDE BOUDREAU