Reference no: EM133899717

Question

Designing a database to track medication administration errors and adverse events is essential for supporting patient safety, compliance, and quality improvement efforts in healthcare. However, even a well intentioned design can present challenges if best practices are not followed. After reviewing the proposed scheme for a six month medication risk management system, several design issues were identified that may impact data integrity, scalability, and reporting accuracy. The current design uses free text fields such as administered by, error discovered by, and reported by instead of referencing a staff table using foreign keys. This practice increased the risk of data inconsistency and makes it difficult to track staff involvement accurately. According to Connolly and Begg (2020), enforcing referential integrity through foreign key constraints is a best practice that ensures data accuracy and maintains consistent relationships between entities. Although the mar id serves as a surrogate primary key, the schema does not enforce uniqueness for combinations such as patient id, medication id, and administration time. Without a composite unique constraint, duplicate or inconsistent medication entries may occur. Supporting this, Coronel and Morris (2019) emphasize the importance of applying composite keys or unique constraints to preserve data quality in time sensitive clinical records.