Over the last three decades there has been a dramatic increase in the number of medications and generic versions of medications release by pharmaceutical companies.
Add to that the greater volume of patients evaluated and treated over time and the result has been an increasing number of medication errors, along with bad outcomes in patient care.
With the use of health informatics, IT solutions have been able to dramatically reduce the number of errors through many different methods.
These include better methods of reporting medication incidents, better safeguards through monitoring interactions and allergies, better communication among healthcare staff, and better tracking abilities which offer better chances for effective policy changes.
As a result of these benefits, informatics has resulted in better medication care for many people.
In years past, medication incidents may only be reported if significant side effects or bad outcomes were evident.
Often, however, no reporting was made if ill effects were absent because errors may have never been identified especially if medication treatments were limited or short term.
While this "no harm, no foul" methodology was acceptable for a time, these seemingly harmless mistakes offered great potential in warding off bigger problems later.
IT solutions allows these incidents to be captured and reported more comprehensively as medication ordering, prescription filling, and medication administration are tracked and compared to safety information.
If errors exist along the way, incident reporting is automatic.
As part of these monitoring systems in place, other safeguards are possible as well.
With the number of medications on the market and the list of drugs some patients take, keeping up with drug interactions is incredibly difficult.
Likewise, monitoring patients' allergies can be time consuming as well if a long list exists or if their allergies are not well consolidated.
IT solutions easily allow these medication problems to be prevented through comparing medications to databases of information that details drug interactions and patients' allergies.
This alone has made huge impacts in reducing medication incidents.
Another difficulty in medication incident reporting previously has been the lack of direct communication among physicians, nurses, and pharmacists.
Connecting these professionals in an efficient manner when medication questions arose or when reporting medication incidents was problematic.
Health informatics provides rapid communication among these individuals by conveying messages and alerts electronically by internet or intranet email messaging systems.
As a whole, the enhanced communication allows almost immediate notification when medication incidents arise.
This may even prevent the problem or incident before it occurs.
Lastly, IT solutions have allowed a much better ability to track patterns of medication errors and incidents within a healthcare system.
If a few physicians were responsible for the majority of medication errors, it was more difficult to distinguish this pattern without system wide electronic data processing.
Likewise, if a few medications were consistently the problematic issues at hand, the same problem of identifying this trend was evident.
Instead, medical informatics allows this data to be collected and analyzed yielding clear patterns of behavior or groups of medication that influence incident occurrence.
This in turn allows policies and procedures to be changed that correct their occurrence.
This has much greater benefits for all of patient care as a result.
While medication incident reporting will always be necessary, health informatics allows a healthcare system to be thorough and efficient in its ability to identify, track and report medication incidents as they occur.
The "speed" of healthcare dictates this ability so that patient care can be improved and so that safeguards can be put into place.
The end result is that quality of care uniformly improves as medications are prescribed safely and effectively for the benefit of the patient.