Tuesday, March 27, 2012

E-Health Records: Are We Safe(r) Yet?


From the article: "Electronic health records haven't exactly been touted as health care's Holy Grail. But there are high expectations for the technology's ability to fix some of health care's major comorbidities -- information unavailability, poor interprovider communication and inconsistent (or no) documentation -- and thereby improve patient safety across the board. Too high, some experts claim. … Those unreasonable expectations are one factor in some safety problems emerging in the EHR realm. Drug-dosing errors resulting from weight-conversion or -limit features, medication list discrepancies among systems, treatment delays resulting from faulty provider-computer interaction and important free-text comments that don't cross interfaces are among the hazards increasingly being reported." Read more