Patient Safety and Quality Informatics Research

Patient safety and quality informatics research involves understanding and addressing related workflow, change management, communication, and human-computer interface issues, and developing methods to evaluate models and systems, including health services research and data mining.

Incident Identification

Patient safety issues often require manual efforts to identify and analyze them. Investigators from BIC, the Center for Enterprise Quality and Safety (CEQS), and the College of Pharmacy are using the High-Performance Analytical Data Warehouse (HPADW) to automate the identification of incidents and potential incidents for manual review or aggregate analysis and improvement measurement.

The existing medication error reporting system serves as the pilot project for this work, and it has been used for work related to computer physician order entry and Kentucky Children's Hospital data.

CEQS and BIC are using the analytic environment to provide support for existing core measures indicators, quality indicators, and future reporting requirements, automating data collection and formatting. As CEQS uses the HPADW to identify opportunities for process improvement, BIC will develop measures to understand the impact of these changes on the UK system, including how volumes, staffing, facility utilization, revenue, cost and profit impact clinical process changes.