Technology | 02.04.20
Death by a Thousand Clicks: Where Electronic Health Records Went Wrong
by NAMSS Staff
Fortune (03/18/19) Fry, Erika; Schulte, Fred
Electronic health records (EHRs) have made U.S. healthcare worse, not better, in the decade since their inception, according to an investigation by Fortune and Kaiser Health News. The government promoted EHRs as making medicine safer, less costly, and of higher quality while empowering beneficiaries with portable health records. Experts say the promised electronic information ecosystem has instead devolved into a fragmented mess, locking health providers into frustrating technologies while inflating tech companies' revenues. Doctors are saddled with unintuitive systems that make them lose precious on-the-job time. Proprietary EHR systems typically do not interoperate, so doctors still have to send medical data via fax and even CD-ROM. Meanwhile, beneficiaries often cannot access their own records. Worse, the EHR project has given rise to mostly unacknowledged risks to healthcare recipients, including user errors that could mean the difference between life and death — exacerbated by secrecy policies that block public disclosure of such flaws.
Read the full article from Fortune.