Patient safety, resilience and ICT. A reason for concern?
During my studies of the implementation of a new hospital wide information system for medical charts, the project's impact on patient safety emerged as a topic of interest for the clinicians involved. While Karl Weick [1] applies the law of requisite variety to illustrate the correlation between professional variety and medical errors, it is argued here that a similar notion could be applied to the variety in modes of information in hospitals. Based on this, the question is raised whether or not the introduction of standardized computer systems at the expense of existing solutions could pose a threat to this variety, and subsequently to the hospital's resilience in handling uncertainty.
Skorve
Espen
E
Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway.
D006751:Hospital Information Systems; D006801:Humans; D019300:Medical Errors / Q000517:prevention & control; D008490:Medical Informatics; D017751:Safety Management