Purpose, Target Audience, and Benefits of Information Technology Improvement

Executive Summary
Name
Institution
Executive Summary
Introduction
The healthcare sector around the world strives to improve and enhance the quality of patient care and safety in health care facilities. Improved quality of patient care through enhanced safety during the delivery of medical services serves to reduce the cost of healthcare, which is increasing at an alarming rate. Additionally, quality patient care and safety reduces the occurrences and spread of preventable diseases, infections, or other medical complications. One of the factors leading to or rather contributing to low-quality care and safety of patient care is the administration of medication errors in hospitals. Medication error administration during various phases of care provision in health care facilities such as prescription or at the point of transcribing, preparation of the medication, dispensing of the same, its administration, and even when monitoring the patients. Factors contributing to the administration of medication errors include poor communication especially during prescription and transcription, dispensing errors from the pharmacy, and poor stock management of medication for the wards. Besides poor communication among the outlined aspects of healthcare facilities, other factors such as nursing staff shortage, interruptions during administration of medication to patients, and poor organization of wards also play a significant role in the proliferation of the problem. The board’s sanctioned investigations into the cause of the problem at a local health care facility established that poor communication among the stakeholders involved in the administration of drugs to patients as the area of concern. The board thus settled on the development of a quality improvement initiative seeking to improve the flow of communication among the relevant parties for enhanced patient care and safety. Provided herein is a proposed communication enhancement initiative for the overall improvement of quality care and patient safety at the institution.
Quality Improvement Initiative; Information Technology Improvement
Developing an integrated system of information communication connecting all the stakeholders involved in the administration of medications to patients at the hospital makes for an effective interventional measure to reduce the occurrence of errors. The enhanced information technology intervention targets the nursing staff who administer the drugs to patients, pharmacists, and ward stock managers as those are the key areas contributing to the problem. Installing an elaborate electronic system for tracing medication that connects th...