Description
Patient safety is the cornerstone of high-quality healthcare and depends upon procedures linked to the detection, prevention, reduction, documentation, and evaluation of errors that otherwise can lead to adverse events, both preventable and non-preventable. Beyond the high volume or morbidity and mortality associated with patient safety adverse events, a significant cost burden is imposed on national healthcare systems. As a result, hospitals and healthcare settings in the United States and the 5 Western European countries analyzed in this study (i.e., UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy) are implementing advanced solutions to address the different types of adverse events associated with patient safety (injuries, errors, accidents, and infections). Moreover, medical technology (medtech) companies, hospital information technology (HIT) companies, and even leading players from other industries continuously undertake R&D efforts to introduce innovative technologies and solutions designed to reduce or eliminate patient harm.
Several patient safety solutions exist in the market, but with great technical complexity and massive volumes of data, medical error trends are increasing like never before. Errors committed by healthcare staff, including clinicians, can range from improperly updating electronic health record (EHR) data and misspelling medication names to performing the wrong surgical procedure on a patient. Also, the impact of COVID-19 has not only increased the occurrence of these events, but introduced new infection risks. The entire range of patient safety errors that involves medical errors, pressure ulcers, sepsis, and healthcare acquired infections (HCAIs) are mostly preventable, unless the patient’s condition becomes critical.
Next-gen patient safety solutions introduce artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, machine learning, deep learning, natural language understanding, and other emerging technologies to address adverse events in a more effective way, leading to impactful decision-making by clinicians, reduced morbidity and mortality rates, decreased cost burden, and high-tech solutions that take patient safety to new heights. Among the top goals of companies’ next-gen solutions are the detection of adverse events at an early stage, even before occurrence, to prevent them and reduce or eliminate clinician/nurse burnout, which is enabled by increased automation, accuracy, ease of operation, speed, and cost-effectiveness (in most cases).
In this study, Frost & Sullivan has categorized next-gen patient safety solutions into three types: IT-based, medical device-based, and process-based. We have studied the three major care settings of hospitals, primary care, and long-term care. As the US and Western European healthcare industries are witnessing the shift from fee-for-service to outcome-driven value-based care, focus is now on providing quality care and patient satisfaction to ensure patient safety. Increased risks of infection, communication gaps, diagnostic errors, lack of early detection solutions, reimbursement policies by the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the UK National Health Service (NHS), and implementation of emerging technologies are among the drivers boosting the introduction and adoption of next-gen patient safety solutions.
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