Are e-health records at fault for Ebola mistakes?
A Dallas man who became the first person diagnosed with Ebola in the U.S. has died. And while the hospital that treated him has retracted a claim that its electronic health records (EHR) system contributed to a lapse in his diagnosis, experts are skeptical that the system worked properly.
The problem isn’t that the patient’s recent travel to West Africa hadn’t been documented. Instead, it’s that a physician would have had to search the EHR for that history in order to find a link to Ebola, according to Judy Hanover, research director at IDC Health Insights.
“They’d have to click through to look at it and read it deliberately,” she said in a blog post about the incident. “And in this case, those few extra clicks and their impact on productivity in a busy emergency room may have been a problem, if not an actual flaw in the EHR system.”
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