EHRs may be changing the healthcare industry at a lightning pace, but it appears that the patient safety downsides of health IT, including alarm fatigue and workflow struggles, remain sadly the same. These issues, along with patient monitoring and surveillance shortfalls, have consistently camped out on the annual ECRI Institute Top 10 Health IT Hazards list, and are likely to continue to plague the industry in 2016.

Additional patient safety hazards highlighted by the report include unsafe injection practices that may expose patients to infection, inadequate training for operating room staff and ventilator technicians, mechanical failures of gamma cameras that can cause significant injury or death, and failure to effectively monitor postoperative patients for opioid-induced respiratory crisis.