Health Information Technology Utilization In Patient Safety Promotion By Health Care Workers, Mama Lucy Kibaki Hospital, Nairobi City County, Kenya

ABSTRACT

Health IT is an application of information processing involving both computer hardware and software that deals with the storage, retrieval, sharing, and use of health care information, data, and knowledge for communication and decision-making. The advantages of health information technology (IT) in health care includes facilitating communication between health care providers; improving medication safety, tracking, and reporting; and promoting quality of care through optimized access to and adherence to guidelines. Health IT systems permit the collection of data for use for quality management, outcome reporting, and public health disease surveillance and reporting. The study aimed at assessing Health Information technology utilization in patient safety promotion in Mama Lucy Kibaki Hospital (MLKH), while focusing on the following objectives; establish the role of Health Information Technology (HIT) in promoting Patient safety at MLKH, Nairobi City County Kenya. Specifically, identifying HIT technological factors, determining HIT organizational factors and describing the individual system components influencing utilization of HIT in promoting patient safety. The researcher adopted a Descriptive cross-sectional research design where a sample size of 147 derived using Fisher‟s formula. The researcher adopted a questionnaire and Key Informant guides for data collection. Pretesting for validity and reliability of tools was done at Mbagathi Sub County Hospital. Cronbach‟s alpha was used to calculate the reliability of the data collection tools, with the test conducted on 32 items for the questionnaire and 8 items for the Key informant guide. The reliability results produced alphas of 0.80 and 0.84 respectively, compared to an alpha of 0.7, which was the lower bound for acceptable reliability. Quantitative data was analyzed using content analysis; qualitative data was coded and analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 22.0 and STRATA 12 software for windows where association of variables was tested using chi-square for comparisons. The study found out that 1) Most respondents 66 (56%) felt that HIT played a key role in promoting patient safety. EMR, CPOE and DSS were found to be important HIT useful in ensuring patient safety at the hospital. Following binary logistic regression, the study found sufficient evidence to suggest associations between effective patient safety promotions through HIT as follows; similarity of access passwords (OR=1.2 [95% CI 1.075-1.600]); periodic trainings on HIT (OR =2 [95% CI 1.456-2.027]); involvement of HIT users (OR=1.5 [95% CI 1.180- 1.654]); auto logout of users (OR=0.2 [95% CI 0.052-0.801]), knowledge and use of EMR (OR=0.4 [95% CI 0.195-0.877]); notification on patients‟ identification number (OR=3.6 [CI 0.072-0.572]) and presence of backups to the systems (OR=0.2 [95% CI 1.306-9.916]). The study also observed that doctors were more likely to perceive the utility of HIT in promoting patient safety compared to pharmacists (OR= 0.56 [95% CI 0.131-2.135]) this showed that the results were significant at 95% CI. Based on the findings, it was concluded that staff knowledge and experience on use of HIT improved patient safety, while HIT effectively improved storage, retrieval, automation and confidentiality issues pertaining to patient safety. The study recommended continuous evaluation and monitoring of patient safety outcomes by promotion and modification of HIT in the healthcare delivery in MLKH