ArticleBMJ open2024
What are the unintended patient safety consequences of healthcare technologies? A qualitative study among patients, carers and healthcare providers.
Article in BMJ open, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Patient and Clinician Attitudes Toward Mobile Health Apps: Qualitative Study.JMIR mHealth and uHealth · 2026Article
- Safe harboring and governance: Lakota relational systems as context for women's health integration.Frontiers in sociology · 2026Article
- Why digital health fails silently: a sociotechnical theory of health information technology-related risk.Frontiers in digital health · 2026Article
- Opportunities, Challenges, and Future Directions for the Integration of Automation in Nursing Practice: Discursive Study.JMIR nursing · 2025Review
- Exploring Chinese family caregiver vigilance in preventing hospitalized children falls from the attention network theory perspective: a qualitative study.Translational pediatrics · 2025Article
- Population health management fit lifecycles in analytics.Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2025Article
- Examining the relationship between digital hospital level and patient safety culture: A study on healthcare workers.Digital healthArticle
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
objectiveTo identify patient-safety-related unintended consequences of healthcare technologies experienced by their primary users: patients, carers and healthcare providers (HCPs).
designQualitative study based on data collected in online focus groups. Transcripts were analysed inductively after each focus group using reflexive thematic analysis, focusing on identifying unintended consequences of healthcare technologies with implications for patient safety. Patient safety was broadly conceptualised to include a more subjective concept of 'feeling safe' as well as risks of actual harm.
settingPatient/public and HCP participants from the UK with experience in healthcare technologies were recruited using a mixture of purposive, convenience and snowball sampling.
participants40 participants (29 patients/public, 11 HCPs) took part in 5 focus groups between November 2021 and February 2022.
resultsWe identified five main themes of unintended consequences with implications for patient safety: inequity of access, increased end-user burden, loss of the human element of healthcare, over-reliance on technology and unclear responsibilities. Both groups of participants identified unintended consequences directly affecting patients; HCPs also described those affecting themselves. Some unintended consequences are described in previous literature, including alert fatigue, the 'illusion of communication', reduced opportunities for face-to-face interactions and increased end-user burden. Others are potentially novel, including patients' psychological dependence on technologies, 'gaming' of data entry and incorrect interpretation of health data.
conclusionsDrawing on the perspectives of patients/public as well as HCPs, we identified five areas of patient-safety-related unintended consequences associated with healthcare technologies. These should be considered when developing tools to identify and mitigate the patient-safety-related unintended consequences of healthcare technologies.
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