The need for a refined classification system and national incident reporting system for health information technology-related incidents

Abstract

strategy 1 IntroductionHealth information technology (HIT) has been defined as: "hardware or software that is used to electronically create, maintain, analyze, store, receive (information), or otherwise aid in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment or prevention of disease and that it is not an integral part of (1) an implantable device or (2) medical equipment" (1).Due to the immense advancement of HIT (interchangeably known as digital health, health informatics, information management, and technology in some health environments) in modern medicine, HIT incidents have been prevalent within healthcare settings over recent years (2).This is due to several reasons, such as asynchrony between the rapid growth of HIT systems and the complexity of the clinical workload, dysfunctional HIT systems, and inconsistency in the expectations of healthcare staff (3-5).Despite many benefits, HIT systems pose sociotechnical complexities in healthcare and cause risks to patient safety, often in a new and unforeseen way (3-5).The challenge with digital health in relation to patient safety is the wide spectrum of digital health practices.These encompass instances of wrong diagnosis based on commercial names of medications or their physical attributes, a situation that can potentially lead to harmful health outcomes (6).Moreover, the rise of the complex volume of healthcare data and emerging artificial intelligence impose serious threats involving diagnosis and treatment recommendations, patient engagement, and administrative tasks.These complexities affect the entire healthcare organization, including patients, physicians, health workers, managers, and health systems cooperators (7).The use of social media, a vast and largely untapped data source, has been completely ignored in creating a classification system for HIT patient safety.This oversight highlights the urgent need for improved data sources, including social media, to enhance our understanding and management of patient safety in the digital health era (8).Over time, a few classification systems have evolved in collecting, classifying, and analyzing patient safety HIT incident reports, including classification systems for medical devices that HIT may cover (9).Inconsistencies in these classification systems pose several challenges; for instance, HIT classification systems (HIT-CS) cover more concepts and classes than medical devices.The challenges also include a lack of classes for mitigating factors, actions taken to reduce risk, and ameliorating factors.

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