Market Education

Patient Safety

 click on the pdf for the full article

There are some serious flaws in our patient care delivery systems. Typically addiction treatment providers need to assume applicability to patient safety from acute care settings; refer to Institute of Medicines (IOM) publications “To Err is Human” and “Crossing The Quality Chasm.” However, in 2006, IOM released a study focused on the mental health and addiction treatment settings in the United States; “Improving the Quality of Health Care for Mental and Substance Use (MH/SU) Conditions.” This finally brought national attention to improving conditions in our treatment settings. Our purpose here is to summarize key aspects of those studies and demonstrate Sequest’s ability to address your needs with our products and services.

“At least 44,000 people and perhaps as many as 98,000 die in hospitals each year as a result of medical errors that could have been prevented” (To Err is Human:
Building a Safer Health System). IOM strongly urges providers to create patient safety programs, make safety a number one priority for all staff and dedicate
resources and funds to error analysis and the redesign of flawed processes. One of the main suggestions derived from research across all areas of healthcare is the use
of an electronic health record (EHR). Sequest took the following strategies outlined in the literature into their product development:

Adopt a system oriented approach to medication error reduction.
Implement standard processes for medication doses and dose timing.
Standardize prescription writing and prescribing rules.
Implement a physician order entry.
Implement unit dosing.
Use special procedures and protocols for use of high risk medications.
Make relevant patient information available at point of patient care.