Chemistry Seminar Series - Dr. Dewey Howell, MD, PhD

Medical Errors, Increasing Healthcare Costs, and the Rise of Healthcare Information Technologies to Build a Modern, Safer Healthcare System

Dr. Dewey Howell, MD, PhD
Senior Physician Lead
Clinical Applications

Friday, September 27th @ 2:30PM
FB 253

In 1999, the Institute of Medicine issued its seminal report, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, on patient safety and medical errors. The release of this report resulted in a wave of healthcare process redesign, technology innovations, and government regulations intended to produce a modern, safer healthcare system. Concurrently, there has been growing pressure to reduce the rising costs of healthcare while delivering higher quality care, while saving patients’ money. In this talk, we’ll review this landmark report on medical errors and the industry’s response to it over the past 25 years. This will focus on the concepts of medication reconciliation, drug safety alerting, clinician alert fatigue, clinician efficiency, patient medication compliance monitoring, and addressing the high costs of medications. We’ll examine these important patient safety and health care quality topics through a hands-on demonstration of technology innovations that have evolved to help busy clinicians optimize their efficiency, reduce medical errors and delivery high-quality clinical care. Finally, we discuss the more recent rise of data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare, intended to address persistent challenges.