Improving healthcare by demanding better IT

Abstract: 

Western healthcare is turning into an IT problem: huge amounts of
money are spent on IT, yet efficiency is not improving enough, and
about 10% of preventable deaths are associated with poor IT.
Clinicians are often blamed for errors that are due to IT systems,
whether patient administration systems, medical devices like infusion
pumps or medical accelerators, or standard tools like Excel. This
seminar introduces this over-looked but serious problem, presents some
important principles, and argues that improving systems is the best
way forward. We then present some new ideas for driving improvement.

This seminar will be of particular interest to computer scientists and
manufacturers (people who should do something about the problems),
psychologists (people who understand the problems), clinicians (people
who have to work around the problems) and patients (people who suffer
unnecessarily from the problems). People involved in hospital
procurement will also find useful ideas here.

Prof Harold Thimbleby is a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering
Technology and the Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh. He has been
a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holder as well as a
Leverhulme Senior Research Fellow. He is an investigator on the
CHI-MED project, www.chi-med.ac.uk, which is improving medical device
design.