The Director of MOH Clinical Information Systems, Dr. Abdulrahman Al-Bawardi, has affirmed that the Ministry is eager to improve the quality of health services provided to patients. In this spirit, a number of e-systems have been recently launched. They are intended to follow up beneficiaries' information quickly and efficiently.
In a press statement, Dr. Al-Bawardi pointed out that one of these systems is the Critical Errors Reporting Program, which makes use of the services offered by the MOH Portal. This program enables the Ministry to record all public and private hospitals, in addition to providing information on each hospital and its director. That's to be added to certain information on authorized users of the system.
For sake of clarity, Dr. Al-Bawardi went on to explain, “A critical error has defined by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) as an unexpected error leading up to the patient's death, or serious bodily or mental harm usually unrelated to the normal path of the disease. The program will help provide a root cause analysis (RCA) for such errors, and develop preventive techniques meant to reduce or prevent the recurrence of critical errors and their triggers.”
“When a critical error takes place,” he continued, “the hospital's authorized system user instantly records it. Immediately following that, a text message (SMS) is sent to MOH senior officials, identifying the error, its date and place. Then, the proper measures are taken by contacting the hospital and obtaining the necessary information, in addition to demanding the RCA of the error.”
Dr. Al-Bawardi made clear that punitive actions will be taken against any hospital (both public and private) in case of the reluctance to record critical errors or conduct RCA. In so doing, we're looking forward to realizing the program's ultimate objective, which is: the improvement of health services provided for the Saudi people.
Concluding his statement, Dr. Al-Bawardi pointed out that the Critical Errors Reporting Program comes within the framework of the MOH's strategy aiming to attain a future vision coping with the momentous progress achieved in the health arena all over the world. It is also concordant with the enormous role incurred by the Ministry of Health as it is responsible for the provision of best-quality health services for patients. To that end, the Ministry has harnessed highly-qualified, proficient human resources (physicians, nurses and technicians), as well as state-of-the-art medical equipment, to provide high-quality diagnostic, curative and preventive services.