Sarah Kliff, The Washington Post
“There’s a lot of interest in health care right now in digitizing doctors’ decision-making, using computer databases to assist in diagnoses and treatments (Exhibit A: Wellpoint’s pilot project using Dr. Watson, the Jeopardy-winning super-computer, to assist doctors in the exam room).
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Ken Terry, InformationWeek
“A new AMA report on patient safety in ambulatory care finds that safety problems are widespread but that little is known about which problems cause the most harm. Among the uncertainties cited by the AMA researchers is the contribution of electronic health records (EHRs) to patient safety.
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Ana Cantu, Forbes
“Experts estimate that 195,000 people die each year from medical errors in U.S. hospitals. That’s more than the annual number of deaths as a result of AIDS, breast cancer and auto accidents combined.
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Kristine Martin Anderson, Government Health IT
“Even among very knowledgeable people, the concept of health information technology is often equated with its most familiar element, “electronic health records.” Adoption of electronic health records are a critical first step to realizing the transformational power of Health IT – but getting out of paper enables even greater HIT capabilities.
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Anthony Aspesi, FutureDocs
“A classroom at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine was packed earlier this month with both medical students and students in the Graduate Program in Health Administration and Policy (GPHAP) interested in learning more about the IHI and quality improvement.
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Jha AK, Classen DC. N Engl J Med, 365(19)
More than a decade ago, the Institute of Medicine released its famous report To Err Is Human, which set an ambitious agenda for the United States to reduce the number of Americans who were hurt or killed by medical errors and adverse events.
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Denise Amrich, ZDNet Health
“Electronic healthcare management is a really fascinating, promising topic, and most of the time, you hear people focusing on the improvements in patient care, as well as cost and time savings, partly because it helps make a case to get healthcare organizations on board with change.
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Neil Versel, InformationWeek
“Recognizing that electronic health records (EHRs) can and do cause medical errors, a group of EHR vendors has agreed to support a patient-safety organization’s online system for reporting adverse events.
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Steelman VM. American Journal of Surgery, 201(2)
BACKGROUND
A retained surgical sponge is a serious medical error that results in negative patient outcomes. Radiofrequency (RF) technology has recently been introduced to evaluate for the presence of a retained sponge. The aim of this study was to evaluate the sensitivity and specificity of the detection of surgical sponges embedded with an RF chip through the torsos of subjects of varying body habitus, including the morbidly obese.
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Remen VM, Grimsmo A. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 80(11)
Background
Information deficits contribute to medical errors. Hence several efforts to develop electronic communication systems to facilitate a flow of information between health care providers have been attempted, including initiatives to develop regional or national electronic patient summaries.
Objectives
To study information access and information needs in inpatient emergency departments, and how clinicians in these departments handle deficits in available information.
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Gearing P et al, Journal of Healthcare Information Management, 20(4)
As technology becomes more sophisticated in healthcare, there is increasing need to measure its impact on key quality indicators, such as error reduction, patient safety, and cost-benefit ratios. When a product is designed to decrease medical errors, the baseline error rate must be determined before implementation to accurately measure the impact. Given the opportunity to adopt a technology that would eliminate the need to manually document vital signs, a large Florida hospital decided to measure the current process and error rate of vital signs documentation.
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Radecki RP, Sittig DF. JAMA, 306(1)
Since publication of To Err Is Human, electronic health records (EHRs) and related health information technologies have been promoted as means to improve patient safety. This promise remains largely unfulfilled. For instance, whereas EHRs with clinical decision support (CDS) interventions integrated into computerized physician order entry (CPOE) have measurably improved clinicians’ performance on process metrics, their effect on patient outcomes remains unconfirmed.
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Patty Enrado, EHRWatch
“Family physician and medical blogger Kenny Lin wrote of the error he almost made several years ago when he prescribed medication for one of his patients using his EMR system. He clicked the wrong choice, but caught his mistake before the patient left the office. Lin’s assessment: “electronic systems only change the nature of the medical errors that are made.”
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Daphne Swancutt, KevinMD
“Two people in the United States just died in the last hour. Seventeen more will die in the next 7 to 8 hours. Over a year, that number will accumulate to about 7,000.
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Katherine Hobson, WSJ Health Blog
“How could the Health Blog resist a law journal article on two of our (and our readers’) favorite topics — medical liability and electronic medical records?
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Patty Enrado, EHRWatch
“A medical overdose resulted in death at a Maine hospital in early June. A man who was admitted to the emergency room was initially given a drug and then given 10 times the original dose a second time when his symptoms reappeared.
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Pickering BW et al, Applied Clinical Informatics, 1(2)
The introduction of electronic medical records (EMR) and computerized physician order entry (CPOE) into the intensive care unit (ICU) is transforming the way health care providers currently work. The challenge facing developers of EMR’s is to create products which add value to systems of health care delivery. As EMR’s become more prevalent, the potential impact they have on the quality and safety, both negative and positive, will be amplified.
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Sittig DF, Classen DC. JAMA, 303(19)
In Reply: We share Dr Koppel’s concern regarding challenges of detecting noncatastrophic errors that might result from inadequate EHR design, development, implementation, and use.
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Koppel R. JAMA, 302(19)
To the Editor: In their Commentary on the need for a comprehensive monitoring and evaluation framework for electronic health record (EHR) use, Drs Sittig and Classen called for a national EHR adverse event investigation board, similar to the National Transportation Safety Board.
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Don Fluckinger, SearchHealthIT
“Electronic prescribing, also known as e-prescribing, is a bedrock element of the federal government’s push for health IT.
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