Health Informatics in Developing Countries: A Review of Unintended Consequences of IT Implementations, as They Affect Patient Safety and Recommendations on How to Address Them

Background: Patient safety concerns every healthcare organization. Adoption of Health information technology (HIT) appears to have the potential to address this issue, however unanticipated and undesirable consequences from implementing HIT could lead to new and more complex hazards. This could be particularly problematic in developing countries, where regulations, policies and implementations are few, less standandarized and in some cases almost non-existing.

Methods: Based on the available information and our own experience, we conducted a review of unintended consequences of HIT implementations, as they affect patient safety in developing countries.

Results: We found that user dependency on the system, alert fatigue, less communications among healthcare actors and workarounds topics should be prioritize. Institution should consider existing knowledge, learn from other experiences and model their implementations to avoid known consequences. We also recommend that they monitor and communicate their own efforts to expand knowledge in the region.

Why Patient Centered Care Coordination Is Important in Developing Countries? Contribution of the IMIA Health Informatics for Development Working Group

Patient Centered Care Coordination (PCCC) focuses on the patient health care needs. PCCC involves the organization, the patients and their families, that must coordinate resources in order to accomplish the goals of PCCC. In developing countries, where disparities are frequent, PCCC could improve clinical outcomes, costs and patients satisfaction.

OBJECTIVE

the IMIA working group Health Informatics for Development analyzes the benefits, identifies the barriers and proposes strategies to reach PCCC.

METHODS

Discussions about PCCC emerged from a brief guide that posed questions about what is PCCC, why consider PCCC important, barriers to grow in this direction and ask about resources considered relevant in the topic.

RESULTS

PCCC encompasses a broad definition, includes physical, mental, socio-environmental and self care. Even benefits are proved, in developing countries the lack of a comprehensive and integrated healthcare network is one of the main barriers to reach this objective. Working hard to reach strong health policies, focus on patients, and optimizing the use of resources could improve the performance in the devolvement of PCCC programs. International collaboration could bring benefits. We believe information IT, and education in this field will play an important role in PCCC.

CONCLUSION

PCCC in developing countries has the potential to improve quality of care. Education, IT, policies and cultural issues must be addressed in an international collaborative context in order to reach this goal.