BigERRORS · Exploring the promise of big data for medical error elimination
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2016-08-01 → 2018-07-31
- EU contribution
- €177,320
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-GF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Exploring the promise of big data for medical error elimination
This project is about achieving a better understanding of the phenomena of errors. Errors in organizations are essentially unintended and potentially avoidable deviations from organizationally-specified goals and standards. Errors are a recurring fact of organizational life and thus merit study in their own right as an important phenomenon. In particular, medical errors in the health care industry pose serious threats to human life and affect total national costs. An estimated 8-12% of patients admitted to hospital in the EU suffer from adverse events upon receiving health care. I studied how big data can assist in improving our understanding of the error phenomena. So far, the error literature suggests a limited understanding of the origin of errors and of ways to eliminate them. I explored how big data can be used to eliminate errors by referring to aspects such as clinical workflow, information processing, health care decision-making, and the delivery of care. The use of big data technologies can reduce health care costs while improving its quality by making care more preventive and personalized. However, there is very little published management literature that tackles the challenges of using big data and explores the promise and opportunities for new theories and practices that big data might bring about. As in other fields and industries, big data has only recently begun to become a factor in health care. Big data calls for the interplay of error theory building and testing. This project was based on the promise that the next revolution in the science of eliminating and managing errors in organizations may come about by incorporating big data at the core of error theory and research. Taking a multidisciplinary approach that synergistically integrated managerial and health care perspectives with big data analytics and other technological aspects, the work I carried out during this research applied the novel concepts, approaches, and methods of error theory and big data techniques that include excessive data collection and new analytical methods. As a result of this study, I have extensively explored fundamental aspects of errors and suggested a better understanding of them.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Errors in hospitals pose serious threats to human lives and affect total costs. Big data research is fast becoming a tool that not only analyzes patterns but can also provide the predictive likelihood of an event. Big data may be a great opportunity to make data an engine to dramatically decrease error rates in hospital. However, there is very little published research literature that tackles the challenges of using big data in organizations and explores the promise and opportunities for new theories and practices that big data might bring about. The overriding objective of this proposal is to explore the promise of big data for eliminating and managing errors in hospitals. The beneficiary, Prof Eitan Naveh from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, is a world leading researcher in the area of errors. The partner organization is Harvard University. The partnership member from Harvard is Prof Sara Singer, a world-class leading Professor of Health Policy and Management at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Prof Naveh will spend the first year of the research project in Harvard and will be hosted by Prof Singer. During the fellowship, Prof Naveh will obtain training and new knowledge in Harvard’s exciting environment, and specifically in Prof Singer’s new health care High Reliability Learning Lab. Prof Naveh will gain training and new knowledge that refers to new interdisciplinary scientific techniques and transferable skills in big data, and will set a new research agenda for the science of errors in hospitals. The competences Prof Naveh will gain will allow new state-of-the-art research with opportunities to practice and improve health care. Prof Naveh will develop a network to communicate and disseminate the study’s results and to realize its exploration and developments.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- TECHNION - ISRAEL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY · HaifaCoordinatorIsrael
- PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE · CambridgeUnited States
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union