electronic health records (EHRs)

Registered nurses at Antelope Valley Hospital in Lancaster, Ca have asked the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health to investigate the failure of an electronic health records system at their hospital last weekend which they say led to the closure of the hospital emergency room and multiple other problems that put patients at risk. In a message to the Los Angeles DPH office, Antelope Valley RN Maria Altamirano, on behalf of other RNs who are members of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses United warned that on February 27 “our entire electronic and data system failed.”

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Electronic health records provide many benefits, but also bring about "unintended consequences" of errors that can affect patient safety in the emergency department, according to a new article in the Annals of Emergency Medicine. Read More »

The global market for electronic medical records has shot up to $23.2 billion in 2013, according to a new report from research firm Kalorama: EMR 2014: The Market for Electronic Medical Records.  Governement incentives and the increasing use of electronic medical records for quality of care and cost-saving reasons continue to drive the market, researchers found.

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In response to mounting evidence that use of electronic medical record systems may cause unintended consequences, and even patient harm, the AMIA Board of Directors convened a Task Force on Usability to examine evidence from the literature and make recommendations. This task force was composed of representatives from both academic settings and vendors of electronic health record (EHR) systems. Read More »

With the entire healthcare industry undergoing tremendous amounts of change — from how care is coordinated and delivered to how providers are reimbursed for that care — there are likely to be side effects. One the head of the American Medical Association (AMA) is targeting is the matter of physician burnout tied to providers having to balance the day-to-day realities of patient care with federal and state mandates regulating aspects of that care such physician EHR use and clinical quality reporting...

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The first section of this article reported some news about Epic’s Orchard, a new attempt to provide an “app store” for health care. In this section we look over the role of APIs as seen by EHR vendors such as Epic. Dr. Travis Good, with whom I spoke for this article, pointed out that EHRs glom together two distinct functions: a canonical, trusted store for patient data and an interface that becomes a key part of the clinician workflow. They are being challenged in both these areas, for different reasons...

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