Electronic health records (EHR) were studied recently, with results published by American Medical News. The Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority analyzed more than 3,000 incidents from hospital reports of EHR errors. These hospital negligence and error reports, however, note only a small fraction of these mistakes that lead to patient harm.

While EHR errors doubled from 2010 to 2011–from 555 to 1,142–the number of patient problems as a result remained small. From the start of report analysis in 2004, through 2011, only 16 incidents apparently resulted in patient harm. Of those 16, researchers determined that only one case was "significantly harmful."

Almost one-half of the reports involved "wrong input" into the EHR system. Another 18 percent of mistakes were "failure to update" errors in the EHR, although up-to-date information was in the paper files. Around one-third of the reports involved hardware- or software-related issues, without a dominant number of miscues in any one area.

The program director of the Pennsylvania safety authority believes the EHR errors are primarily based on human interaction involving entering wrong information. He notes, "There is something about the design of the display that would lead someone to do that." He further states, ". . . that many of the problems we're seeing with the EHR are very analogous to problems we've seen with paper records for years."

It appears that the classic computer mantra, "garbage in, garbage out," is at play with EHR. There are calls from some medical experts that a federal body should investigate health IT-related adverse events. Some believe that the inherent complexity of these computer systems is a root cause of the increasing errors. While few have caused serious patient harm to date, these input errors increase the risk of potential serious harm to patients.

Do you have an opinion on the cause of or solution to these EHR input and update problems? Do you agree with those experts that fear potential increasing patient harm, if these errors continue?

Source: American Medical News, "EHR-related errors soar but few harm patients," Kevin B. O'Reilly, Jan. 14, 2013