Clinical errors have become a widespread tendency over the last ten years. While technology prosperity is at its highest historical levels, the human factor still plays a significant role in clinical issues increase. Thus, nearly 100,000 cases are recorded annually, which indicates a stable but not growing tendency (Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, 2019). Even though the scale of the medical errors is sufficiently large for more than 350,000,000 people, the crucial cases that lead to deaths are still rare. As a result, the assessment should be concentrated on the most critical part of the medical errors, which is the drug prescription mistake (Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, 2019). Correct drug usage is crucial for Americans since any misalignment might result in devastating health conditions or allergy development, which is enough widespread practice (CDC, 2019). While technological advance is consistently increasing their influence on the medical industry, the rising number of drug types and nomenclatures will result in a positive correlation with clinical issues.
The action plan consists of three aspects: providing a higher level of medical education, increasing the efficiency of technologies in the drug prescribing sphere, and assessing the risk of human error. First and foremost, when identifying the medical stakeholders who will be affected by the possible improvements in the industry, it is critical to distinguish different levels and understand the specific hierarchy principles correctly (Jin, 2016). First and foremost, these educators will be influenced to change their teaching methods and approaches by providing the new techniques described in the action plan. Secondly, medical professionals, such as nurses, surgeons, and medical assistants, will have a different knowledge base so that they will be informed about their practice “pitfalls.” Last but not least, the patients will be mainly affected by the implications of the new policies and practices. Moreover, they indicate the plan’s progress since the significant decrease in medical errors will demonstrate the efficiency of specific measures and vice versa. From the general perspective, the government authorities whose liability is to maintain and increase the level of medical service would be influenced to change their “improvement” tactics from enforcing the observational resources to directing their workforce to create the valuable strategy of decreasing the number of medical errors.
Secondly, the costs of plan execution should be specifically defined and applied to the appropriate timeline. Moreover, one of the methods of increasing the efficiency of cost calculation is to define the resources of funds for each aspect of the plan theoretically. To be more specific, the investments in the development of necessary IT solutions for automatic drug prescription systems will be majorly made by private entities. As a result, they would use from 10 to 15 % of the research and development expenses, which is the average percentage in the industry (Kahriman, 2016). Since it is impossible to accurately assess the market capitalization of growing companies that provide technological solutions for clinics and other entities, the average percentage of research and development expenses would help visualize and compare the expenses.
Finally, a properly adjusted timeline plays a pivotal role in planning success since the concrete dates allow the executives and observers to measure the efficiency of the process. To correctly implement the time perspective to the overall strategy, it is critical to understand the possible resources and their maximum or, in some cases, minimum potential. While technological solutions are a growing industry, some significant improvements in developing the automatic drug prescription system will occur in the next five years (Jin, 2016). However, concerning the educational facet, the structural changes would take more time since medicine is a “traditional” field of study. Nevertheless, the possible timeline for a sufficient increase in educational quality will take from five to ten years, which is retrieved from economic theory since this is the average number of years that significant changes occur in any type of industry.
References
CDC. (2019). Medication Safety Program: Medication Safety Basics. CDC. Web.
Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. (2019). Working to Reduce Medication Errors. FDA. Web.
Jin, H., Munechika, M., Sano, M., Kajihara, C., Chen, H., & Guo, F. (2016). A Study on the Methodology to Analyse and Prevent Medical Errors Due to Non-observance. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, 355–364. Web.
Kahriman, L., & ÖZtürk, H. (2016). Evaluating medical errors made by nurses during their diagnosis, treatment and care practices. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 25(19–20), 2884–2894. Web.