Death by a Thousand Clicks: Where Electronic Health Records Went Wrong
(disclaimer: I used to work on EHRs, hence the name...)<p>This article is melodramatic and terrible, and I feel sorry for anyone who gets their opinion on EHRs from it. It reads like some kind of expose, like it&#x27;s uncovering some disturbing truths and showing the reader that our system is totally broken, or something. Not true at all, it&#x27;s just that some people have bad experiences that get sensationalized and put into an attention-grabbing news piece. And then people read it and only hear about the bad stuff.<p>As someone who&#x27;s worked in EHRs, I can tell you we&#x27;re a lot better off with EHRs than ever before (particularly compared to hospitals that used to put everything on paper, in a freaking file cabinet...) and we&#x27;re just improving with time. Granted, bad EHR software does exist out there, but as a whole we make patient care significantly better.<p>I put some real examples below. I think we have tons of anecdotal evidence pointing to the positive impact of EHRs, but I&#x27;ll admit we don&#x27;t have many statistics either (good or bad). I think you basically have to work in the EHR&#x2F;healthcare space to see the positive impacts for yourself, but I hope this post helps people see the good things we do, too.<p>+ Catching medication administration and other procedural errors that would lead to patient harm and death<p>+ Allowing patient info to be accessible at other hospitals, when it&#x27;s needed to adequately care for a patient (real example that has happened countless times: patient comes into the ER unconscious, but has a nametag; nurse uses it to look up the pt in the system, but he&#x27;s never been to that hospital before. No problem; nurse requests his record from the hospital he <i>has</i> been to, and gets his whole history, allergies, etc so they can better determine a cause and what treatment is OK for the patient)<p>+ Allowing anonymized patient data to be used for population health and other research; a doctor used this to catch the Flint, MI water crisis<p>+ Nurses&#x2F;docs can just look up patient info in one system instead of searching through an ever-growing file cabinet, or having to go get their paper record from another department, etc. It&#x27;s just all in one place. Hospital admins can more easily run anonymized reports&#x2F;statistics on their patients, departments, etc. to see how everything&#x27;s going.<p>+ EHRs are able to suggest tests or screens for the patient depending on their symptoms and their whole medical history (which, again, is all in one place). In some cases, this is just a nice reminder for the provider, but in other cases can indicate something deeper is going on with the patient that really needs to be tested.<p>+ Sending prescriptions to pharmacies is often automatic instead of needing a call, which essentially removes another point of failure. Sending information about specimens, like blood tests or scans, can also be automatic depending on the EHR.<p>+ Patients may have a patient portal with the EHR that gives them a view of their past history&#x2F;visits and provides an easy way to request prescription refills, schedule appointments (no call required!), and receive test results.