June 14, 2010
Florida Board Member Recommends Statewide Warning on EMR Errors
Written by: John
Here’s an interesting story from Florida:
A Florida Board of Medicine member wants the board to issue a statewide warning about EMRs, following an incident in which an OB-GYN missed an abnormal Pap smear and blamed the EMR. The OB-GYN punished the EMR by replacing it, while the Board of Medicine punished the OB-GYN with a $20,000 fine, a risk management review, and 100 hours of community service. The board member, a dermatologist, said “”I think the Department of Health needs to put out a warning to physicians that they need to look at their programs’ default settings. This year we have seen as many if not more medical records violations from electronic medical records as we saw from hand-written records violations.”
I’m not sure what benefit the Department of Health issuing a warning would do. I know I’ve never personally seen a warning from the health department (outside of the major news ones). One thing is clear to everyone involved with EMR or not. EMR isn’t the secret potion with no issues. Doctors are still accountable for the care.
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6 responses to "Florida Board Member Recommends Statewide Warning on EMR Errors"
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Margalit Gur-Arie had a great post recently (both at her blog and on The Health Care Blog) titled “Do EHRs Kill People?” addressing this type of situation. I’d say a full-blown Health Department warning is overblown int he specific case you sighted; it looks like a case where someone simply needed to pay attention to training and/or read through the manual to make the tool work for him.
Interesting choice of words: “The OB-GYN punished the EMR by replacing it …,” but they didn’t replace the ob-gyn who made the mistake? Hmmm …
Hi John,
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/electronic-medical-records-may-cause-patient-care-errors-729288.html
In my opinion, the system was setup improperly and not tested at the site. It should be a must that extreme cases are tested at each installation site to prevent similar cases like mentioned in the article.
Hi,
EMRs/EHR are the support tools for the evidence based documentation and for physician knowlege base, not for the automatic treatment/care/diagnosis/physical exam for the patient. It is totally a humen error not the technologies.
Before sign off with EMR application vendor, all the clinical flow and Physical Exam template building and sub components which was provided by them has to be reviewed, tested and authonticated, because the templates[HPI, ROS, Exam] will be custom based but as per E&M guidelines[it doesn't mean the complete physician documentation is captured]
I still don’t see what a warning would actually accomplish. Sadly, the lawyers are probably licking their chops and are setting up to chase ambulances.