Welcome to EMR and HIPAA

One of the possible advantages of an EMR system is that you can have your EMR tell you of potential interactions between drugs prescribed to a patient or even Drugs that can’t be given because of certain allergies. This is a great feature, but there are cases where the suggestion needs to be ignored. How do you handle that in an EMR is an important question and what liability does a clinic have if a doctor decides to ignore it?

A recent article described a good study that was done and gave some good ideas. Here some important points I found from the study:

-Quality alerts will be used by Doctors, espescially when they are specific
-Doctors often have to ignore the alert since the patient needs the medication

I also really like how they did the study by forcing doctors to give a reason why they are ignoring the alert. I think that could significantly help with liability problems.