Overcoming Challenges in Health Technology Implementation to Maximize Patient Safety Benefits

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About this Research Topic

Submission deadlines

  1. Manuscript Submission Deadline 13 January 2025

  2. This Research Topic is still accepting articles.

    1. Check author guidelines

Background

The use of technology in healthcare is now ubiquitous, with the COVID-19 pandemic providing an additional impetus for governments and healthcare organizations to accelerate their implementation of technologies, particularly those that facilitate the delivery of care from a distance.

A key driver for the implementation of health technology is patient safety, with technology often viewed as a panacea for safety issues, like diagnostic and medication errors leading to adverse events. In reality, there have been few demonstrations of clinically significant improvements to patient outcomes following technology implementation, with studies typically including a surrogate or process outcome to evaluate systems.

Importantly, for safety benefits to be realized with technology, health technology needs to be adopted by end-users and used in the way envisioned by designers, which requires technologies to be designed with end-users to ensure needs and preferences are met. Despite the increased implementation of technologies, a large proportion are never used, worked around, or abandoned by clinicians. For example, recent research has shown that only one in three clinical decision support systems that are available to healthcare providers are actually used in practice.

Challenges with technology adoption are varied and many, but this Research Topic welcomes submissions that present solutions and strategies for overcoming challenges and achieving safety benefits. In particular, this collection welcomes attempts to improve the uptake of health technologies by end-users and/or the realization of safety benefits.

Research papers may:
• Empirically test approaches to ensure adoption of health technologies by end-users;
• Identify and describe strategies that have led to high adoption of technologies;
• Describe approaches for ensuring health technologies are fit for purpose;
• Describe the evaluation of the impact of health technologies on patient safety, with submissions exploring why and how this impact is achieved/not achieved especially welcome;
• Capture the use of workarounds as they relate to health technologies, and how these workarounds have been addressed to ensure sustained uptake of technologies and safety benefits;
• Explore the perceptions of relevant stakeholders on the influences of health technologies on patient safety.

We welcome research from a broad range of settings and populations and focused on a range of health technologies.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

  • Brief Research Report
  • Case Report
  • Classification
  • Clinical Trial
  • Community Case Study
  • Data Report
  • Editorial
  • General Commentary
  • Hypothesis and Theory

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

  • Brief Research Report
  • Case Report
  • Classification
  • Clinical Trial
  • Community Case Study
  • Data Report
  • Editorial
  • General Commentary
  • Hypothesis and Theory
  • Methods
  • Mini Review
  • Opinion
  • Original Research
  • Perspective
  • Policy and Practice Reviews
  • Policy Brief
  • Review
  • Study Protocol
  • Systematic Review
  • Technology and Code

Keywords: Technology, Healthcare, Implementation, Patient safety, Diagnostic errors, Medication errors, Health Technologies

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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Manuscripts can be submitted to this Research Topic via the main journal or any other participating journal.

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