In recognition of the fact that so-called “adverse medical events” can cause harm to their professional reputation and their bottom line, more and more hospitals across the U.S. are now implementing innovative measures designed to keep patients safe and minimize the fallout from medical mistakes. If you think that hospitals are perhaps being overly cautious […]
Patient safety is one of the primary stated intentions behind the push for computerized medical records. To the extent illegible handwriting leads to errors this specific problem would be eliminated by computerized medical records. However, the risks to patients when computerized record systems are used have caused a developing safety crisis. Companies market their software […]
There are currently no regulations in place to protect patients from errors. There is always tension between the desire to provide a product quickly and the need for quality review to maximize safety. HIT does not receive any of the oversight afforded other medical devices. For example, currently, there are no regulatory requirements to evaluate […]
Money On February 17, 2009 President Obama signed into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) which includes detailed provisions concerning health care technology. The health care information technology provisions of the ARRA are referred to as the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act and its provisions became effective in […]
There is a long list of potential benefits to EHR’s. Consult any list of the potential benefits that electronic records purportedly offer over paper records and you will find the following points being made. Electronic records allegedly: Allow access to patient information when and where it is needed Bring together all health information related to […]
No. Most systems have taken the data categories of the paper systems and organized the computerized version around the categories. Physician’s orders, progress notes, nurse’s notes, radiology, laboratory reports and medication administration records are the computer “folders.” In a paper system you simply flip to the section of the chart that contains what you want […]
Scribes? A scribe is a worker who enters information into the computer as the physician examines the patient. The appeal is that the doctor can focus on the patient instead of the computer. Although this sounds reasonable, I wonder what the doctor does if he needs patient information only available in the computerized record. Is […]
Last week, our blog began discussing how both medical professionals and officials with the Food and Drug Administration were growing increasingly fearful over the spread of an especially virulent type of bacteria via a medical scope used in roughly 500,000 procedures here in the U.S. every year. Unfortunately, it appears that these fears have now […]
Last time, our blog discussed how several hospitals in the U.S., including right here in Pittsburgh, saw an outbreak of the carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae — CRE — infections back in 2012, and how these infections were ultimately traced by investigators to specialized medical devices known as duodenoscopes. According to these investigators, the spread of CRE wasn’t […]
When you are being wheeled into the operating room, you are immediately greeted with the smells of disinfectants, and the sights of shiny surfaces and gleaming instruments. This naturally serves to put your mind somewhat at ease, as you believe that the infection threat posed by contaminated equipment is non-existent. This is not entirely true, […]
