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Use of Information Technology to Improve Patient Safety and Quality of Nursing Care

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Submitted By Marlawin4
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Use of Information Technology to Improve Patient Safety and Quality of Nursing Care
Introduction
We are in a great evolution in the way we are gathering data, gaining information, and increasing our knowledge to provide our patients’ with safe quality care. Without information technology (IT) in today’s healthcare industry, it would be impossible to delivery high quality care. The purpose of this paper is to explore data accuracy & safety, data integrity, and the contributions of IT.

Data Accuracy and Safety
One of the biggest obstacles to interoperability among information systems is the vast amount of medical terms used to describe the same concept. One strategy that is being implemented in IT to increase data accuracy and safety is to ensure that all electronic health records (EHRs) in all hospitals share common standards for data, classifications, coding systems (Qamar, R., Kola, J.S., & Rector, A.L., 2007). The aim is to standardize medical vocabulary to reduce differing interpretation of information and errors resulting from the traditional paper records. This is an accomplishment that groups have been working on for the last decade. The health IT Standards committee has endorsed a single set of vocabulary standards and a single guide for putting them in place for each area of quality reporting measures (Mosquera, 2011). Two work groups, The Systemized Nomenclature of Medicine-Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT) and The Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC), are submitting proposals to the Health IT Standards committee for approval. The SNOMED-CT will be used to describe condition, diagnoses, transactions between the patient and physician, and adverse drug reactions while the LOINC is used for lab and clinical identifiers. It is a work in progress that will require fine tuning.
Another strategy that is being used to ensure accuracy of

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