EMR: Safe When Used as Directed?
Harold Hambrose, Electronic Ink
“There’s no question about it—electronic medical records have become a growth industry. And I’m worried.
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Safety
Computer Order Entry Systems Reduce Preventable Adverse Drug Events
HealthCanal
“Despite a national mandate to implement electronic health records and computer order entry systems (CPOE) by 2014, only approximately 30 percent of hospitals nationwide have done so and around 40 percent of hospitals in the state of Massachusetts have made this transition.
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Impact of Vendor Computerized Physician Order Entry in Community Hospitals
Leung AA et al, Journal of General Internal Medicine, 2011
BACKGROUND
It is uncertain if computerized physician order entry (CPOE) systems are effective at reducing adverse drug event (ADE) rates in community hospitals, where mainly vendor-developed applications are used.
OBJECTIVE
To evaluate the impact of vendor CPOE systems on the frequency of ADEs.
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When doctors ditch pens, medical errors drop
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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European eHealth network to be set up
Dominic Tyer, Digital Intelligence Blog
“The European Commission is to set up an eHealth network to help drive technological innovations such as tele-monitoring and e-prescriptions, and improve the safety and efficiency of patient care.
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IOM Weighs in on EHR Safety
Robert Rowley, EHR Bloggers
“Recently, the Institute of Medicine (IOM), chartered by the National Academy of Sciences to advise the federal government on issues of medical care, research and education, delivered a publication on Health IT and Patient Safety: Building Safer Systems for Better Care.
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Electronic Health Records, Quality & Safety: Pritzker IHI Open School Recap
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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The Recognition Is Dawning Health IT Needs Thought, Smarts and Care. It Is Not Clear The PCEHR Program Gets It!
David More, Australian Health Information Technology
“To me the time for DoHA and NEHTA to come out and formally announce just what they plan in a policy and implementation sense in this area has now well and truly arrived.
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HIT Safety Advocate Likes New IOM Report
Joseph Goedert, HDM Breaking News
“In February 2010, Dean Sittig, PhD, co-authored a commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association that listed five ways to improve the safety of electronic health records.
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Encryption and Electronic Health Records
Brian Ahier, Healthcare, Technology & Government 2.0
“The Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary held a hearing entitled “Your Health and Your Privacy: Protecting Health Information in a Digital World” on Wednesday, November 9, 2011. Deven McGraw, Director of the Health Privacy Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology presented testimony (video below).
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10 things you need to know from the IOM HIT safety report
Don Fluckinger, Health IT Pulse
“Research is inconclusive about how safe health IT is for patients overall — and poorly designed software can cause errors in an already complex national system of health care delivery — making government oversight of HIT safety and serious adverse events (death serious injury and unsafe conditions) essential.
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Panel Emphasizes Safety in Digitization of Health Records
Steve Lohr, The New York Times
“Poorly designed, hard-to-use computerized health records are a threat to patient safety, and an independent agency should be set up to investigate injuries and deaths linked to health information technology, according to a federal study released Tuesday.
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Safety Risks Tied to Electronic Health Records Need Scrutiny, Panel Says
Carol Eisenberg, Bloomberg
“Risks from expanded use of electronic health records remain largely unknown, justifying mandatory government reporting of patient deaths and safety problems linked to the technology, a U.S. panel said.
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Panel recommends new agency to regulate safety of health information technology
Kimberly Leonard, iWatch News
“Health information technology has been touted as crucial to better health care, but a new report says an entirely new regulatory agency is needed to oversee this largely unregulated sector, which can also injure or kill patients if it’s not operating properly.
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Docs Warm Up to EHRs, Patients Want Paper
Marianne Kolbasuk McGee, InformationWeek Healthcare
“There’s a bit of a gap between patients and doctors when it comes to electronic health records (EHRs). A new survey indicates that, by a slight margin, the majority of doctors think EHRs are safer than paper records. But more than half of all patients prefer paper. A closer look at the data can help explain the difference of opinion.
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Is my health data safe on the Internet?
Robert Rowley, EHR Bloggers
“Is my health data safe on the Internet? That is a question we hear frequently when describing web-based Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems, as well as the newly evolving field of mobile health (mHealth) applications.
Is my health data safe on the Internet?Privacy and security of health information is a central plank in the policy framework surrounding Meaningful Use and the encouragement to move health care out of a paper-based legacy and onto an e-platform. Banking did this a decade or more ago, but now is the time for health data to move into the modern era.”
Article
Robert Rowley, EHR Bloggers, 3 November 2011
Survey: Physicians Believe EHRs Are Safer Than Paper Records, Patients Evenly Split
PRNewswire
“Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems are becoming more common in exam rooms across the US but how is the technology transition being perceived? A survey conducted by GfK Roper for Practice Fusion asked patients about their views on the safety of EHR versus paper charts while a separate survey posed the same questions to medical professionals.
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Electronic prescribing within an electronic health record reduces ambulatory prescribing errors
Abramson EL et al, Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety, 37(10)
BACKGROUND
Health policy forces are promoting the adoption of interoperable electronic health records (EHRs) with electronic prescribing (e-prescribing). Despite the promise of EHRs with e-prescribing to improve medication safety in ambulatory care settings–where most prescribing occurs and where errors are common–few studies have demonstrated its effectiveness. A study was conducted to assess the effect of an e-prescribing system with clinical decision support, including checks for drug allergies and drug-drug interactions, that was integrated within an EHR on rates of ambulatory prescribing errors.
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HIPAA and HIE – part 1: Community-Based Chart Sharing
Robert Rowley, EHR Bloggers
“A widely-used web-based Electronic Health Record (EHR) system, like Practice Fusion, holds the potential of health information exchange that is quite different than the traditional thinking of how health data can be shared between a referring doc A and a recipient doc B.
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Is The Cloud Safe For Health Apps?
Marianne Kolbasuk McGee, InformationWeek Healthcare
“Healthcare organizations are slowly turning to the cloud to run applications. That’s especially true for smaller healthcare providers who don’t have the IT staff or resources to roll out and support new in-house applications, let alone the hardware, networking, or other IT infrastructure that goes along with it.
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