But while individual errors might be found to be due to the mistakes of one or more people - the tired doctor, the overworked nurse - it's invidious to blame healthcare staff for the WHO's "endemic concern". Why blame humans when we deny them the tools which can help cut the risks of error and improve patient safety?

Why tell staff they have to pull their socks up when there are solutions already out there that can improve their working lives - and make the care they provide that bit better? Electronic systems, wisely designed and implemented, can help reduce risks in a variety of ways - and here's how.

Constraining Human error
"To err is human", as the poet and essayist Alexander Pope said almost exactly three centuries ago. We can see examples of this every single day in every single healthcare setting. The common types of individual human error are lapses and slips; that is, errors of omission (I forgot to do something I should’ve done), and commission (I did something I didn't mean to do). The root causes are many, including such contributing factors as fatigue, distraction, lack of knowledge, poor communication and even deliberate wrongdoing.

Electronic systems don't suffer from many of the frailties of humans. Where they can replace tedious, repetitive, high-speed and complex tasks currently performed by people, they can improve safety. Electronic systems are logical. Steps can be made compulsory: no cutting corners or skipping items by mistake. Think of buying an airline ticket; you must follow the prescribed sequence or else you can’t complete the task.

There are many examples where there is evidence to show improvement in patient safety; here are just a few: electronic cross match of blood; electronic monitoring and voice prompts to enhance hand-washing, thereby reducing nosocomial infections; prompts and pauses. A prompt mandates or reminds the user to do something, e.g. Kenyan HIV compliance, vital signs monitoring. A pause introduces time for reflection or confirmation: "Do you really want to do this?" Cutting out that human element - or even prompting us to think a moment - can and does save lives.

Hardwiring quality
With the best will in the world no doctor or nurse can know everything. They'll have strong points and weak points in their knowledge and skills. They have good days and bad days, like the rest of us. Health IT can help direct care and ensure that the patient stays on the right track, that he or she receives all the appropriate care in a timely manner: right thing, right way, right time. Again, illustrations are plentiful. Enhanced communication across care boundaries, for example, can provide integrated care - vital for things like safeguarding - and also helps to overcome the fragmentation of care delivery.

Formal clinical decision support is also hugely useful, for example, with programmes such as ePrescribing improving the quality and safety of patient care. Informal support such as Medline - and even Google - is also proving its worth. Electronic systems are also great for tracking patients along pathways of care, improving hospital care planning from well before admission to long after they return home. They can also help in implementing care bundles (groups of interventions which, when implemented together, have a synergistic effect on a disease pathway or patient outcome).

Improved decision making for clinicians and patients
Having the necessary information about a patient is essential to good clinical care. Having that information at your fingertips, when you need it, and easily accessible, helps avoid pitfalls and promotes bespoke decisions: forewarned is forearmed. The patient feels valued, listened to and at the centre of your attention. The full recording of clinical observations (such as vital signs and early warning scores) facilitates medicines reconciliation and enhances continuity of care. After all if the notes are consistent and trustworthy, then they will be trusted by the next clinician who treats the patient.

And when things do go wrong
Electronic systems are terrific at discovering the source of problems because they allow data to be captured automatically. Coding systems, such as SNOMED CT and ICD11, aim to overcome ambiguity in language by providing terms that have defined meaning. If information is captured it can be investigated, analysed and presented in meaningful ways. This provides the possibility for remembering and learning from mistakes (retrospective analysis), providing a real-time picture of how things are (current status, dashboards), and how things are likely to be in the future (prediction). Here are just a few examples of how this is working in practice: automated adverse event detection can spot medication errors and infection risk; automated critical incident reporting makes it easier to flag when things go wrong; data mining can identify complex correlations and novel associations that would otherwise never be seen; population surveillance can aid with establishing the safety of products or interventions - such as vaccine safety - and also monitor the spread of infection or progress of epidemics. There are many more examples benefiting all aspects of healthcare. These range from supply chain management - ordering the right stuff, on time, and without unnecessary duplication - to making sure patient information is recorded properly to save the same questions being asked over and over again.

It all adds up
The use of electronic systems in healthcare is already embedded into everyday practice. It would be inconceivable to contemplate providing modern healthcare without such essentials as Patient Administration Systems (PAS), Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) and Theatre Management Systems (TMS). In many parts of the NHS, however, paper-based and manual processes still dominate, and it is in this area that most patient safety issues occur. The time is now ripe to exploit healthcare IT fully in the NHS in order to reap the patient safety benefits. These systems, properly implemented, can provide the step-change in patient safety that everyone knows we need, but which has proved extremely difficult to bring about in practice.

Simply encouraging health workers to pull their socks up doesn't work - and why should it? There's only so much longer that we can make excuses for not implementing these changes.

Pope was quoted earlier in this article, but perhaps we should look instead to Seneca, whose words were probably the inspiration. A couple of millennia ago, he is believed to have said that: "Errare humanum est; perseverare diabolicum." This translates roughly as "making mistakes is human, but carrying on with them is devilish" - and not in a good way. We know that people make mistakes; we know that in healthcare, these mistakes can have serious - even fatal - consequences. We also know that judicious use of IT can reduce the risks. Can we really afford to carry on regardless?

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CSC is a global leader in providing technology-enabled solutions and services through three primary lines of business. These include Business Solutions and Services, the Managed Services Sector and the North American Public Sector. CSC's advanced capabilities include system design and integration, information technology and business process outsourcing, applications software development, Web and application hosting, mission support and management consulting. The company has been recognized as a leader in the industry, including being named by FORTUNE Magazine as one of the World's Most Admired Companies for Information Technology Services (2010). Headquartered in Falls Church, Va., CSC has approximately 93,000 employees and reported revenue of $16.2 billion for the 12 months ended December 31, 2010.