Healthcare Information Technology Exam Guide for CompTIA Healthcare IT Technician and HIT Pro Certifications

Safety

Safety in medicine is often used to mean patient safety. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) has defined patient safety as “the prevention of harm to patients.”⁶ An event during an episode of care that causes harm to a patient is called an adverse event. Patient safety overlaps in many ways with privacy, security, and technology concerns, which we will discuss later in this chapter.

With respect to system and software design, safety means that a life-critical system behaves as needed even when some components fail. Systems that are to be used in healthcare should be designed so that if failure occurs, it will not cause a patient to be physically harmed.

Considerations for Healthcare IT Systems

Ideally, in the early design of a system, the ...