The Health IT Threat
Of the Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for Healthcare Organizations by the ECRI Institute, based on more than 300,000 event reports, health IT or EHRs are the number threat or concern. The issues included:
- data entry errors
- missing data or delayed data delivery
- inappropriate use of default values
- copying and pasting older information into a new report
- use of both paper and electronic systems for patient care
- misattribution of one patient’s data to another patient
This is disheartening because wasn’t electronic medical records going to stop all the medical errors? I believe that it actually does help but the issue has been the ever increasing amount of clicks being added to our work day. These meaningless maneuvers to fulfill meaningless mandates (and quality indicators and billing justifications) cause us to rush or to get lazy or to become indifferent to what we do. That is why the errors happen!! Once again, what started out as a great idea gets ruined by overregulation.
I have been truly ‘practicing’ medicine for over 30 years. The advent of EHR’s is just another hurdle to overcome. I agree that the obscene number of ‘clicks’, mandated by some ‘wizard’ (probably from Harvard-is that wrong to write that?) who has practiced REAL medicine for, oh a year or maybe never, is becoming burdensome. But think of all the data it is generating! Think of all the articles and even long tendentious books that can be churned out. Think of all the data that is generated that produces real worthwhile change (whoops, expecting a bit too much on that one).
Just thinkin’