EHRs may not be the panacea many are hoping for

Selected excerpts from post-gazette.com article:

More and more studies are questioning the efficacy of electronic health records, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has begun collecting reports involving electronic health and IT errors, some of which have resulted in death…

“The thing about these systems is that it doesn’t really look like they’re getting any cheaper,” he said. “And the upgrades and the upkeep represents a very significant cost, especially in outpatient clinics.”

Of those, 163 contained mistakes that could have led to “adverse drug events.” Most errors were mistakes of omission — a doctor left out an important piece of data.

Notably, this “is consistent with the literature on manual handwritten prescription error rates,” the report said. But the larger point is computerized systems do not automatically outperform paper ones. [referring to: Errors associated with outpatient computerized prescribing systems. JAMIA, 2011; DOI: 10.1136/amiajnl-2011-000205]

For an industry that relies on data and evidence-based measurements to make decisions on the clinical and pharmaceutical side, there isn’t a lot of evidence supporting the notion that electronic health records produce cheaper care or better outcomes.

I think the article outlines some of the significant problems that need to be addressed before a truly effective EHR system can be utilized. We’re forcing the healthcare industry to implement a technology that they’re simply not ready for. The IT infrastructure in healthcare is built on marbles and is still years behind the consumer market in all but the most advanced facilities. In addition we continue to struggle to standardize information. We first need to understand what the information will look like before we begin forcing everyone to use it.

There’s no question in my mind that sharing information across the healthcare continuum is paramount to providing safe, efficient, cost effective healthcare. However, there are some key pieces of the puzzle missing. Without those pieces we’re not going to get the whole picture, and that’s a problem.