This piece is the usual hyperbolic BS.
We could go over the drill.
Electronic Medical Records take time, precious time from real medical inquiry.
EMRs create tons of information, but not necessarily tons of good effort.
After you eliminate the pharmacy computer driven elimination of drug interactions and mistakes like prescribing drugs that the patient is allergic, the benefits decline rapidly.
All the patient safety studies are driven by patient safety gurus and wannabees–the claims they make are exaggerated.
The patient safety studies are so flawed that the lead researcher on the Harvard Team that got so much publicity, Troyen Brennan said in response to the ballyhooed Institute of Medicine monograph, To Err is Human that was the basis for the claim in this report of 100,000 deaths from negligence.
Here is the JunkScience.com post recently that discussed patient safety studies.
http://junkscience.com/2014/03/03/patient-safety-junk-research/
Here is the pertinent part:
But the patient safety crusade hadn’t counted on an honest Harvard physician/attorney named Troyen Brennan.
Within a few months of the big roll out and public relations splash by the Institute of Medicine (a sub of the National Academy of Sciences) on patient safety, announcing that physician/nurse/hospital negligence killed 44 to 98 thousand inpatients a year, Brennan, the lead author of the studies in New York and then Utah Colorado that were the basis for the IOM claim of an epidemic (we here at junkscience know enough to be wary of people like the IOM when they use the word epidemic) asked the NEJM for an opportunity to comment in a sort of Op Ed essay format.
Brennan’s essay appeared on April 13, 2000, 5 months after the release of the IOM report To Err is Human that was greeted with great fanfare as showing that,as USA Today said, doctors kill more people than auto accidents. Nice little sound bite, but misleading.
Even a small negligence rate unavoidable in a complex human activity will produce an impressive number if the denominator is large, and there were tens of millions of hospital admissions a year in the US. 0.25 % negligence with injury found in the studies still projects to a large number nationally.
Troyen Brennan M.D., J.D. — a lead Harvard researcher on the two studies that were the backbone of the IOM report and the source of the negligence death numbers that scared so many — asserted in an essay in NEJM that the research of the Harvard group was weak and was being misused by the IOM. Brennan wrote:
–”I have cautioned against drawing conclusions about the numbers of deaths in these studies.”
–”The ability of identifying errors is methodologically suspect.”
–”In both studies (New York and Utah/Colorado) we agreed among ourselves about whether events should be classified as preventable…these decisions do not necessarily reflect the views of the average physician, and certainly don’t mean that all preventable adverse events were blunders.”
That might help you evaluate the claims made that some new computer driven medical record keeping will somehow make magic and keep physicians and nurses from being so terribly negligent. These people are so sure of the themselves. My experience is that a computer is a tool, sometimes a clumsy tool. No magic except it does make for very big increases in the overhead for medical care.
http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/1782638
The problem with EMR has nothing to do with doctors or medical care. Like everything else the federal government does involving the “health care industry”, it’s about a thrid party being insinuated between you and your doctor. Any mistakes that can be made on paper can be made on a computer, so any claim that moving from paper to computers will eliminate those mistakes is obviously false.
Besides, most doctors already have electronic record keeping. In my experience doctors tend to be intelligent people open to new technology. They just don’t have the right brand of electronic records. Tell me again which article of the constitution says that congress shall pick and choose the winners in an open market?
The medical profession being dragged into the 20th, and maybe the 21st,century was inevitable. I’ve enjoyed the ability to go on-line and pick up test results and schedule visits. My doc has all the pertinent info in a database. What I don’t like is talking to the doc and the doc staring at a computer screen.
I have a friend who is an insulin dependent diabetic. Should she go into a coma, she won’t be able to identify herself, so they can’t look up her records.
She wears an non-electronic, super low tech, medical alert bracelet. D’oh!