Copying common in electronic medical records: study



Mon Jan 7, 2013 8:04pm EST


(Reuters) – Most doctors duplicate and pulp old, potentially prehistoric information into patients’ electronic records, according to a U.S. investigate looking during a by-pass that some experts fear could lead to miscommunication and medical errors.

“The electronic medical record was meant to make a routine of support easier, though we consider it’s perpetuated copying,” pronounced lead author Daryl Thornton, partner highbrow during Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.

Electronic health annals have been touted as carrying a intensity to renovate studious information from illegible scribbles into easy-to-read, searchable standardised papers that could be common among sanatorium staffers and a patient’s several other health caring providers.

Many electronic record gripping systems concede content to be copied and pasted from prior annals and other documents, a by-pass that could assistance time-crunched doctors though that could also means mistakes to be upheld along or medical annals to turn indecipherable, critics argue.

To see how most information in studious annals came from copying, Thornton’s team, in a investigate published in Critical Care Medicine, examined 2,068 electronic studious swell reports combined by 62 residents and 11 attending physicians in a complete caring section of a Cleveland, Ohio hospital.

Progress annals are typically common among doctors, nurses and other sanatorium staff and are meant to request a course of a patient’s tests and treatments.

Using plagiarism-detection software, a researchers analyzed 5 months’ value of swell annals for 135 patients.

They found that 82 percent of residents’ annals and 74 percent of attending physicians’ annals enclosed 20 percent or some-more copied and pasted element from a patients’ records.

Thornton and his colleagues did not inspect what encouraged physicians and residents to duplicate and paste, or either a by-pass influenced studious care.

But in one case, a studious left a ICU and was readmitted a integrate of days later. The patient’s medical record enclosed so most copied and pasted information that a new group of doctors wasn’t means to interpret a strange diagnosis. In a end, a group called a physicians who creatively diagnosed a patient.

Experts suggested that duplicating signifies a change in how doctors use notes, divided from being a means of communication among associate medical providers and toward being a fusillade of information to request billing.

“What tends to get blank is a account – what’s a patient’s story?” pronounced Michael Barr, comparison clamp boss in a Division of Medical Practice, Professionalism and Quality during a American College of Physicians. Barr was not concerned in a study. SOURCE: bit.ly/UKgOcP

(Reporting from New York by Trevor Stokes during Reuters Health; modifying by Elaine Lies)

Via: Health Medicine Network