Our safety blind-spots when using digital health interventions

Problem

Digital technology has revolutionised healthcare but the changes have not all been positive. The effect of digital innovations is mainly seen on processes rather than patient outcomes because healthcare is a large and complex system in which actors often only perceive their local environment. Consequently, the effects that digital innovations have on both patients’ health and patients’ safety outcomes are not salient to those who use the digital innovations. Instead, enlightening such effects tends to be the responsibility of the relatively few academic and clinical researchers that study healthcare as a complex adaptive system. Lessons learned from such study does not always find its way back to the actors conceiving, developing, implementing and using digital health innovations.

Approach

In this talk, I will speak about three blind-spots in current use of digital health innovations, with particular focus on regulation and patient safety.

Findings

Firstly, regulations are often ignored because those who write the regulations do not control the access and use of what they are regulating. Secondly, regulations will always play catch up because they are reactive to the unregulated evolution of digital innovations. Thirdly, innovation (and subsequent regulation) is often ineffective for the ultimate goal because there is a tendency to do what can be done rather than what needs to be done.

Consequences

It is hoped that an improved awareness of these blind-spots will encourage safer design, implementation and use of digital health innovations.