Patrick Malone, Technorati
“Electronic health records (EHRs) hold much promise for reducing medical errors and improving quality of care, but the prospect that patient advocates can use EHRs to do an autopsy of where a patient’s care went wrong has some in the medical industry sounding an alarm.
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Joseph C. Kvedar, Sam Bierstock, Wall Street Journal
“Email has been so commonplace for so long that some people consider it nearly obsolete. But in the health-care profession, its use for communications between doctors and their patients is still controversial.
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Kesselheim AS et al, Health Affairs, 30(12)
Clinical decision support systems—interactive computer systems that help doctors make clinical choices—can reduce errors in drug prescribing by offering real-time alerts about possible adverse reactions. But physicians and other users often suffer “alert fatigue” caused by excessive numbers of warnings about items such as potentially dangerous drug interactions. As a result, they may pay less attention to or even ignore some vital alerts, thus limiting these systems’ effectiveness.
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Ann W. Latner, Clinical Advisor
“Electronic health records (EHRs) seem like a good idea at first glance. These systems can provide more accurate health records, record treatments, reduce errors based on handwriting and provide all treating health-care providers with access to the same patient data.
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Salil Garg, Mudit Mathur, Express Healthcare
“Cyberspace is a fast-changing, globally-networked, multicultural, and multilingual information environment with vast possibilities. It calls into question, national and international borders, cultural and ethical standards, regulations, and laws, which it bypasses and challenges.
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Neil Versel, InformationWeek
“The rapid movement toward electronic health records (EHRs) may unwittingly raise physician risk for malpractice lawsuits and push liability insurers to raise their premiums, a new report suggests.
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Larry Ozeran, Mark R. Anderson, ACGroup
“Health Information Technology (HIT) has a history dating back almost 50 years to its origins in bioinformatics. The earliest HIT pioneers considered how best to encode and store information about patient treatment, but were limited primarily to basic science research projects or managing patients in their own institutions.
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Anne Zieger, EHR Outlook
“It may not be fun to consider this, but alas, we must. It appears that in the wrong circumstances, your EHR might pose new legal liabilities for your practice.
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Don Fluckinger, SearchHealthIT
“In a legal sense, health IT can be both a blessing and a curse, as it closes medical liability issues associated with paper records but opens new ones associated with computers, according to a legal expert who broke down specifics at the World Congress 3rd Annual Leadership Summit on mHealth.
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Ross Koppel, KevinMD
“Which will improve a person’s health more? Running around the block for 20 minutes or sitting at a computer entering their cholesterol and blood pressure readings?
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David Troxel, KevinMD
“The more things change, the more they stay the same. The increasing use of Electronic Health Records (EHRs), “cloud-based” applications, Application Service Providers (ASPs), and offsite electronic storage has led to an increase in laws and court rulings governing them—and these could affect your practice.
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Prasoon Kumar, The Mobile Indian
“Smartphone owners these days have to shell out small sums of money to download health apps on their mobiles and get numerous pages of useful health literature. Even if the mobile phone is out of coverage area, the user still gets necessary first aid information.
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Victor Agreda, Jr., TUAW
“I’m neither a doctor nor a lawyer, but you don’t have to have an MD to realize that medical apps are becoming an ever-more-important tool in managing our healthcare choices, costs and overall wellness. In a similar vein, medical accessories to our iDevices could make home medical care cheaper and easier.
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John Farrell, The Mobility Blog
“With Pricewaterhouse Coopers’ Health Research Institute estimating the annual consumer market for mobile monitoring devices is somewhere between $7.7 billion and $34 billion per year, it’s not surprising that the marketplace would find itself chock full of apps directly targeting consumers, above and beyond those developed and marketed to healthcare professionals.
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Kenneth Robertson, Virtual Mentor
“EHR, EMR, HIT, HIE. The letters themselves evoke emotion. The young find their pulses quickening with excitement about the new world order. Members of the older generation of doctors are more likely to experience tachycardia when they read these letters, due to the dread they evoke. One thing is certain: the digital age is invading health care and not about to retreat.
Now that my hair is thinning and turning to a white-gray mix (probably prematurely as a result of my interface with the “digitization” of health care), I get to share some of my thoughts on the many new and interesting ethical issues for physicians as we “go digital.”
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Kluge EW. International Perspectives in Health Informatics, 2011
eHealth is a cost-effective and efficient way of providing health care to patients who would otherwise be excluded or underserviced. However, eHealth also presents a series of ethical and legal challenges which, if not met before its implementation, can undermine its success. Among other things, privacy, consent and liability are implicated, as are changes in the health care professional-patient relationship and in the role of health informatics professionals. Legacy systems and interoperability present further challenges, and outsourcing may pose special problems. This paper highlights some of these issues and outlines their implications.
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Pamela Lewis Dolan, amednews
“Medical liability insurers once said electronic medical records would let physicians earn discounts on their premiums, because the potential benefits of the technology included improving patient safety.
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Steve Hernandez, Risk & Insurance Online
“Spurred by $34 billion in financial incentives from the U.S. stimulus package, healthcare organizations are racing to adopt information-technology products and services. Healthcare IT, or HIT, has been pitched as a panacea for improving patient care, reducing medical errors and increasing cost-saving efficiencies, and after 2015, instead of offering incentives, the government will penalize healthcare providers that don’t use it in a meaningful way.
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Nithin Jayan, MedIndia
“Complete documentation and timely access to patient information become possible with the introduction of EHR and thus allows sound clinical decision making. Other advantages include reduced number of transcription errors, improved communication among providers, and less duplication of tests.
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Jean DerGurahian, Health IT Pulse
“How will electronic health records change the legal landscape for physicians? Recent studies suggest they will indeed have an effect even if stakeholders are still unsure about how. And with such legal uncertainty, is investing in EHRs worth it?
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