Errors in Ambulatory Settings
Healthcare providers, as well as patients, are often aware of clinical errors and systems challenges leading to poor healthcare outcomes in hospitals. Such high-risk environments include the emergency department, intensive care, surgery as well as perinatal care. Contrastingly, there has been less scrutiny on the ambulatory setting, and people usually presume it is a safe zone and focus on relatively well individuals. However, studies indicate that there are several clinical errors associated with the ambulatory setting. They include diagnostic testing errors, medication safety events, falls, HIPAA violations, and safety and security incidents. Diagnostic examination errors usually occur during clinical testing and have significant implications for patient care. Most of these errors occur during lab tests, cardiology, pathology, and imaging tests. Diagnostic testing errors cause much of liability claims by patients against primary care physicians and contribute to the highest amounts of payouts. Healthcare facilities can improve through the provision of decision support tools to enable physicians to conduct proper tests and monitor follow-up and test cracking processes.
On the other hand, medication safety incidents entail making wrong drug prescriptions, wrong timing, or wrong patient. Prescription errors can happen at the phase of medication and contribute to much of malpractice claims against physicians in ambulatory settings. Such errors often arise from several system failures. Thus, healthcare facilities should adopt standardized clinical management processes and establish policies directing reporting and managing of safety events. Falls contribute to several hospitalization cases each year. The majority of falls occurring in ambulatory settings usually happen in waiting rooms and examination rooms. As such, physicians should always consider the risk of falls in patients during visits and implement proactive measures to identify patients with a significant risk of falling. Misunderstanding concerning HIPAA security and privacy rules contribute to hundreds of HIPAA-linked events each year. The majority of these errors pertain to reckless disclosure of patients’ information by medics. Lastly, security and safety events involve disruptive behaviors or verbal insults from visitors and patients. Thus, healthcare organizations should train their staff on how to handle violent incidences and conduct regular safety and security surveillance rounds.