Impact of Information Technology on Patient Safety and Quality

Quality of services and patients’ safety is an important aspect in every healthcare system. It can be defined as prevention, avoidance of injuries or various adverse outcomes stemming from various healthcare processes. Based on Institute of Medicine report in 1999, call for testing and developing new technologies in the healthcare system in order to reduce various medical errors so as to improve the quality of various services offered to patients has been embraced. Healthcare information technology can be defined as various applications of information process which involve the use of both hardware of the computer and various storage software applications in managing healthcare process. IT in healthcare has helped in sharing, retrieving and use of data, information, and knowledge for communication of decisions in the healthcare system (Chaudhry et al.