Building Systems That Keep Patients Safer

I’m a pharmacist informaticist, which means I spend my days where clinical care meets technology. The question I come back to, again and again, is simple: how do we build systems that keep patients safer?

That question is older than most of us realize, and it has deep roots right here in Utah. In the 1960s, Dr. Homer Warner (the father of Medical Informatics) and his colleagues at LDS Hospital and the University of Utah built HELP, one of the first hospital information systems to put computerized decision support at the bedside. Utah was also home to one of the first academic departments of medical informatics in the country. When people talk about where clinical informatics began, they are talking about our backyard. Every one of us working in healthcare IT here inherits that legacy, and every one of us gets to add to it.

That’s the quiet truth of our field. Technology rarely fails loudly. It fails in the gap between how a system was built and how a nurse, pharmacist, physician, or patient actually uses it at 3 a.m. Alert fatigue, copy-forward notes, a drop-down list one row off: these are informatics problems, and they are patient safety problems. Closing those gaps takes clinicians, engineers, analysts, executives, and vendors in the same room, talking honestly. That’s what this chapter is for.

Healthcare IT in Utah is full of people doing hard, important work, often alone, often at 9 p.m., and often with no one to ask whether they’re seeing it right. Being part of Utah HIMSS means you don’t have to work that way. You can call someone who survived the go-live you’re about to start, or learn from a peer at another health system who already solved the interface problem you’re stuck on. You can find a mentor, become one, or both in the same conversation. I’ve watched careers, collaborations, and friendships begin at our events, and the generosity of this community continues to inspire me.

Here’s what I believe: the best ideas in Utah healthcare don’t live inside one health system or one company. They live between us. Systems keep patients safe only when the people behind them keep learning from each other. Our job is to make it easy to find each other.