The Joint Commission’s 2011 National Patient Safety Goals (NPSG) for hospitals should be included in electronic health record certification and criteria for meaningful use, say authors of a commentary that appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association. 

“Ideally, addressing the NPSGs should be incorporated into the EHR certification process, requiring each vendor to specifically engineer targeted solutions and each organization to carefully implement and use these systems to improve safety,” wrote Ryan P. Radecki, MD, and Dean D. Sittig, PhD, authors of a commentary that was published in JAMA on July 6.

Radecki and Sittig break down each of the six NPSG goals for hospitals and how EHRs can be used to help achieve them.

Patient Identification
EHRs should make patient identification more reliable – for example, including visual reminders like a photograph and a requirement to reenter the patients initials if the system finds patients that have “sound- or look-alike names.”

Staff communication
EHRs should go one step further when it comes to notifying physicians about abnormal test results – for example, having to respond in a certain timeframe before being directly notified.

Safe Use of Medications
EHRs with clinical decision support and bar code medication administration are key to improving patient safety, but authors note that “these interventions” have to be part of the clinicians’ workflow or risky “workarounds” will develop.

Infection Prevention
EHRs can be used to track patient that carry staph infections and can also be configured to provide a checklist that can be enabled in real time to improve compliance.

Medication Reconciliation
“This NPSG is perhaps the best example of how current and planned EHR meaningful use criteria can be aligned,” wrote Radecki and Sittig. “However, the most important innovation for applying EHRs to this NPSG will be improved interoperability of medication lists across organizations and EHRs.”

Suicide Risk
Much like the checklist for infection compliance, a checklist to assess self-harm can be incorporated into the EHR. The EHR can also provide notification for patients who should be screened for depression.

“The 2011 NPSGs provide high-yield guidance to EHR certification and oversight bodies who should refine their criteria for meaningful use to include incentives for development and use of tools to enhance safety,” the authors conclude.