Webinar: Embedding clinical safety in medical software implementations

Aug 13, 2013

Tomorrow I’m giving a webinar for MSIA members called “Embedding clinical safety in medical software implementations”. MSIA members can consult their MSIA releases for webinar details. In this webinar, I’ll be looking at clinical safety from a vendor/system developer point of view

I’m going to be focusing on the real world challenges faced by people who make decisions about how systems will work. Usually this is vendor architects and analysts, but can also include developers, in-house teams, and government architecture and purchase teams.

Clinical safety is a real challenge for vendors. Here’s some reasons why:

  • Most clinical safety advice focuses on point of care, but systems are only partial solutions, so advice is rarely directly applicable to system designers
  • Any designer will get a diverse and conflicting array of opinions about what clinical safety means. Approximately 1 per clinician (though it can be more!)
  • Clinical information is more nebulous and the gap between the defined structures and clinical operations is wider than in other industries (as far as I can see)
  • The developer/designer knowledge gap is very wide
  • Healthcare is about, well, health, and the lack of it. Mistakes have much more significant adverse consequences than in many other industries. Also, healthcare is about relative risks, not absolute ones - risky things happen all the time
  • There’s a value perception gap around safety - clinical users think that vendors don’t care, and vendors are sure that users won’t pay anything extra for safety. And vendors are almost all backs-to-the-wall with regard to basic profitability right now
  • Most of the systems have a slower turnover time in basic design philosophy (measured in decades) than clinical safety thinking, which is advancing quickly
  • The loop from error detection to source designer is completely broken

There’s more, but that’ll do for now.

The webinar will review the space, the challenges we face, what MSIA  is doing about it: the MSIA Clinical Safety committee. Also, I’ll be introducing a workshop I’m going to run for MSIA members in November, on behalf of the committee, where we’ll focus  on practical issues around clinical safety in product design, with a focus on case reports (where they are available and repeatable).

p.s. Note that in this work, I’m not really going to focus on programming/coding safety, though I will mention a few hair curling stories of how things can go wrong, but I think there’s more than enough expert advice on this subject.