Name: Insights: Patient Safety Consequences of Poorly Designed Electronic Health Records (Part 3/4)
Uploaded: 2020-07-21
Duration: 6 min 57 s
Description: Electronic Health Records' potential for patient care seemed limitless - but in reality technical and design flaws have led to serious patient risk.

[MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER 1: Each and every patient in the view of Congress believes, as I do, the patient has a right to access their own health care for whatever reason they want. I was stunned when my son, for a year, was battling Stage 4 Glioblastoma. I couldn't get his record. I'm the Vice President nine states of America. A lot of you were very cooperative. I couldn't get his records. It was a absolute nightmare. [MUSIC PLAYING] ERIKA FRY: When the government invested all this money in electronic health records, there was tons of excitement, the promise of really transforming medicine for the better. People were so excited about that. And what happened with the very quick adoption of electronic health records was, some of the software was not actually ready to be implemented in a health setting. RAJ RATWANI: There were clear benefits, but there were also some challenges. And one of those really big challenges was usability and safety, and usability is how effectively, efficiently, and satisfactorily the technology can be used. The poor design of a charge that's sub-optimal with usability can actually lead to direct patient safety consequences. FRED SCHULTE: There's a balance. I mean, on the one hand, there are all these positives that could be accomplished through a system that really works well. But yeah, if you have software breakdowns and nobody is monitoring them closely to make sure that they don't keep happening, you could in fact have very, very severe repercussions from that. Tara Dilliplaine is the mother of Brooke Dylan Dilliplaine who was a 13-year-old girl with a number of medical problems, who had to make frequent trips to the hospital for treatment. TARA DILLIPLAINE: Brooke was 16-years-old when unfortunately we lost her, but she was just a beautiful soul, absolutely beautiful soul in and out. And she had a very tough life medically, physically. I couldn't even tell you how many times she was in the hospital in her lifetime, but it was a lot. We had Brooke going into the hospital for a routine EEG. It's a 24-hour study that will test her brain waves, and while we were there, the hospital gave her two doses of a probiotic that had dairy in it, and Brooke was severely allergic to dairy. So she had two severe allergy reactions while we were there. She went into complete respiratory distress. Her lung collapsed. And while I was there and this was going on, I was researching on my iPad what could be happening, and I was the one that realized that they gave her a product that had dairy in it. ERIKA FRY: Tara argued that they have this electronic health record system that has in the system somewhere, that her daughter was allergic to milk yet she was given a drug that contained that ingredient. FRED SCHULTE: They had said that the milk is an active ingredient, they can't warn about everything, and that they deny that there was anything wrong with their product. And that was their position. ERIKA FRY: With these sorts of cases, it's hard to assign blame. There's this human error, can you blame it on the technology that's supposed to be smart enough and flagging allergies? The great hope for electronic health records was that it would be able to catch these sorts of events. TARA DILLIPLAINE: From what we understood, this is not the only hospital that uses this type of software. So it is everywhere. It's nationwide. And it breaks my heart just to think that there are other patients that are going through this. ERIKA FRY: So beyond the safety risks with the HRs, we found that patients really struggle to get their medical records, and that's especially the case when they've had something happen to the hospital and they're trying to get information on what might have happened. TARA DILLIPLAINE: This EEG is a video and an audio clips of the entire thing, and I had recommended that they watch it so that they can see exactly what went on with my daughter. When we tried to get a copy of it, they told us that it was already erased and they only held on to any seizure activity. So we weren't able to get a copy of it. We ended up going to a lawyer. BOB KOCHER: Patients today are expected to be the experts at their care and put it all together, and know who to listen to, who to work with, and who to find. RAJ RATWANI: I think most patients have never seen an electronic health record. It's not something that we think about on a daily basis. That's something we want to be thinking about on a daily basis, but because we're starting to see this association between electronic health record usability and safety and potentially patient harm there, this is a really important issue. JOHN LOMMURO: I have yet to find a patient in five years ever get the records since they were required to do so in electronic format without prolonged litigation of several years to get it. The patient has to be their advocate. Why not give the patient the opportunity to catch something that somebody misses? ERIKA FRY: Patients struggle to get their medical records for several reasons. For hospitals, it's not in their best business interest to share records. That's what a lot of people argue. They want to keep their patients within the system that makes them hesitant to share patient data with other hospitals. The other issue is hospitals don't love to talk about safety issues within their own walls. But in reality, the reason why patients really struggle to get their health records is a mystery or is something that widespread. Adoption of the HRs are supposed to make happen and we are yet to see it. TARA DILLIPLAINE: Electronic data, it seems like it would be so promising on so many levels. I know for us, we were hoping that we would have one focal point that would bring all of Brooke's records together from so many specialists, but it proved to be that we really couldn't get access to all of that. So I still think there's such a long way to go in terms of electronic data. For anyone that walks through those doors, they deserve to be protected and they deserve better treatment than what my daughter had on those two days. [MUSIC PLAYING] 

Electronic Health Records' potential for patient care seemed limitless - but in reality technical and design flaws have led to serious patient risk.

Insights: Patient Safety Consequences of Poorly Designed Electronic Health Records (Part 3/4)

Fred Schulte, Llana Yurkiewicz, Bob Kocker, Erika Fry

Uncategorized

The design flaws of EHR's have led to serious patient risk.