Improving Care and Saving Lives

(3BL Media / theCSRfeed) - January 5, 2011 - It is every parent’s nightmare: a child is seriously ill; a young life hangs in the balance. Worse though would be if the hospital professionals caring for the child – the people we trust – were to make one simple, fatal mistake.

The awful fact is that many patients die each year as a result of preventable medical slip-ups. A landmark report by the US Institute of Medicine (1999) attributed to human error as many as 98,000 deaths in US hospitals annually.

One of the biggest challenges for hospital staff is the quantity of data generated during normal patient care. These incredibly busy people are working in stressful situations and must monitor, absorb, process, and act on vast amounts of highly complex information – vital signs, bodily functions, medications, reports from different specialists, and much more. Electronic medical records are “data rich but information poor,” says Natalie Pageler, MD, clinical assistant pro