Addressing patient safety through clinical decision support and business intelligence system

Patient safety is one of the most important aspects of healthcare and is very high on the international agenda. The concerted efforts to improve the safety of patients accentuate the need to utilise innovative technologies to address these issues. Organisational system failures have been identified as contributing to patient safety failures and thus a need to improve the systems in order to reduce the likelihood of repeat incidents and prevent future errors. There is a general consensus that Information Technology applications have the potential to improve organisational systems and help reduce medical errors or its causes. Technology also has the potential to manage clinical risk by detecting potential errors as well as improve medical performances by providing active support to clinicians at the time and point of care. This paper reports ongoing work in patient safety which combines a Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS)—PICS and a Business Intelligence System (BIS)—JDD to assist decision making and improve prescribing performance amongst junior doctors.