The concept of coordinated care is considered a best practice, but in light of a recent survey and story by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Harvard School of Public Health, it’s hardly a widespread one. A few years ago, we wrote about what happens to hospital patients when the facility’s right hand doesn’t….
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Glitches on the Path Toward a High Quality Electronic Medical Record System
Early in 2009, President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Commonly known as the Stimulus, or Recovery Act, it was intended to juice the sluggish economy, and it reached into all corners of our culture. One of its effects on health care was the establishment of a national electronic medical record (EMR)…..
Continue ReadingElectronic Health Records Make Doctors Accountable — and Some Don’t Like That
Electronic health records (EHRs) hold much promise for reducing medical errors and improving quality of care, but the prospect that patient advocates can use EHRs to do an autopsy of where a patient’s care went wrong has some in the medical industry sounding an alarm. Last week a story (actually a press release, on closer….
Continue ReadingMedical Apps: When Sharing Goes Too Far
There’s an app for that. Ever since Apple claimed primacy over the smartphone universe, we’ve all become familiar with that refrain. And as noted in a recent report on NPR, mobile medical applications are hot property. Even the stodgy American Medical Association (AMA) has introduced an iPhone app that keeps track of your medications. It’s….
Continue ReadingScience Panel Calls for Greater Oversight of Electronic Medical Records Technology
Last week, the New York Times summed up pretty well what a lot of people have been thinking: “Poorly designed, hard-to-use computerized health records are a threat to patient safety, and an independent agency should be set up to investigate injuries and deaths linked to health information technology, according to a federal study…” The paper….
Continue ReadingHospital Safety: Hazards to Patients Spelled Out in Pictures
Check out this graphic display of some of the statistics of hospital hazards. Infections, malpractice, errors due to poor record keeping, medication errors, mistakes due to sleep deprivation of trainee doctors: It’s all displayed here, courtesy of a group called Medical Billing and Coding Certification.
Continue ReadingProtecting Prescription Histories in the Era of Data Mining
Pharmaceutical companies love dish about doctors and patients almost as much as they love drug profits. One source of information they like to plunder to expand their markets is doctors’ prescribing histories. These “who,” “what,” “why” reports are one component of so-called “data mining” that has gotten much attention lately as a sometimes sneaky way….
Continue ReadingUCLA to Pay Fine for Violating Privacy of Patient Records
Here’s a case that opens a window on how tabloid newspapers get intimate details of celebrity’s medical lives: They pay hospital employees to rifle through private medical records. The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Health System has agreed to pay the federal government $865,000 to resolve allegations that its employees violated patient privacy, according….
Continue ReadingThe Too-Slow Evolution of Electronic Medical Records
One person, two scenarios: the first almost effortless, the second chock-full of hassles. And with those hassles comes the danger of a malpractice event and a preventable patient injury. Consider: Our Patient — we’ll call her OP — had an appointment for a chest X-ray in the morning, and an appointment for a blood draw….
Continue ReadingTwo simple ways to cut medication errors
Medication errors in a hospital’s psychiatric unit were cut drastically with two techniques: an electronic prescription drug ordering system and a computerized method to report adverse events, according to new research from Johns Hopkins University. The leader of the study, Geetha Jayaram, MD, MBA, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins….
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