Health Information Technology Use and Patient Safety: Study of Pharmacists in Nebraska

This study aimed to describe the impact of 13 different health information technologies (HITs) on patient safety across pharmacy practice settings from the viewpoint of the working pharmacist. A cross-sectional mixed methods survey of all licensed practicing pharmacists in 2008 in Nebraska (n = 2195) was developed, pilot-tested and IRB approved. One-fourth responded (24.4%). A database of pharmacists’ responses to closed-ended quantitative questions and in vivo qualitative responses to open-ended questions was built. Qualitative data was coded and thematically analyzed, transformed to quantitative data and descriptive and relational statistics performed. One-third were involved in an error of any kind in the six months preceding the survey, and half observed an error or “near miss”. Most errors or near misses were attributed to workload. When asked specifically about the 13 HITs, these participants reported 3252 observations about the types of errors that were associated with each. These were reports about either error types reduced or eliminated by integration of HIT (n = 1908) or occurring in association with a specific technology’s use (n = 1344). Integration of HIT into pharmacy practice also introduced new error types such as excessive alert programming in the pharmacy computer systems clinical information support causing pharmacists to experience alert fatigue and ignore warnings or bar code scanners mismatching NDC codes of products resulting in wrong drug product identification. Continued vigilance is essential to identifying patient safety issues and implementing safety strategies specific to each HIT.