Communications - June 2008

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