Health information technology (HIT) has been shown to improve patient safety, especially with processes and applications that improve clinicians’ decisionmaking, documentation, and communication.
But research has often looked at these applications in single institutions. A question that remains unanswered is the impact of fully installed electronic health records (EHR) systems used in multiple organizations. Another big question: can EHRs go beyond improving safety-related processes to actually preventing adverse events, such as potentially deadly hospital-acquired infections, from reaching patients?
