Evaluating the role of healthcare facility information on health information technology initiatives from a patient safety perspective

Patient safety is a principal factor in healthcare facility operations and maintenance (O&M). Ongoing initiatives to help track patient safety information and record incidents and close calls include Common Formats and International Classification for Patient Safety (ICPS). Both efforts aim to develop ontologies to support healthcare providers to collect and submit standardized information regarding patient safety events. Aggregating this information is crucial for pattern analysis, learning, and trending. The purpose of this paper is to analyze these existing efforts to see how much facility and facility management information is covered in the existing frameworks and how they can interface with new systems development. This analysis uses documented cases from literature on healthcare associated infections, inputs the data from the cases into the information categories of Common Formats and ICPS, and identifies gaps and overlaps between these existing systems and facility information. With this analysis, connections to these efforts are identified that serve as a leverage for showing the role of healthcare facility information for assessing and preventing risky conditions. Future work will use these findings and the supported ontology to connect patient safety information to a building model for supporting facility operations and maintenance. The aim is generating and interpreting high-level information to provide effective and efficient patient safety in a healthcare environment.