Scot Silverstein
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AMA Calls for Design Overhaul of Electronic Health Records to Improve Usability
Building on its landmark study with RAND Corp. confirming that discontent with electronic health records (EHRs) is taking a significant toll on physicians, the American Medical Association (AMA) today called for solutions to EHR systems that have neglected usability as a necessary feature. Responding to the urgent physician need for better designed EHR systems, the AMA today released a new frameworkPDF FIle outlining eight priorities for improving EHR usability to benefit caregivers and patients. Read More »
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Digital Health Records’ Risks Emerge As Deaths Blamed On Systems
When Scot Silverstein’s 84-year-old mother, Betty, starting mixing up her words, he worried she was having a stroke. So he rushed her to Abington Memorial Hospital in Pennsylvania... Read More »
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Good Health IT vs. Bad Health IT
The title of Dr. Scot Silverstein's teaching website at Drexel University, “Contemporary Issues in Medical Informatics: Good Health IT, Bad Health IT, and Common Examples of Healthcare IT Difficulties,” summarizes the veteran physician informaticist's general outlook on the current state of affairs in health information technology. It tells you nothing, however, of the passion with which Silverstein speaks or writes about the subject. Read More »
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Hazards Tied to Medical Records Rush
Subsidies given for computerizing, but no reporting required when errors cause harm
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Health Technology’s ‘Essential Critic’ Warns Of Medical Mistakes
Computer mistakes like the one that produced incorrect prescriptions for thousands of Rhode Island patients are probably far more common and dangerous than the Obama administration wants you to believe, says Drexel University’s Dr. Scot Silverstein. Read More »
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How EHR Design Can Affect Patient Safety
Besides the importance of physician happiness when using an EHR, using design principles that maximize user intuition and presentation of relevant information, there is one aspect of health care information systems that should never be overlooked: patient safety. Read More »
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Is EHR “Mania” Hiding Serious Patient Safety Flaws?
A typo leads to the administration of the wrong medication. A surgeon looking at a flipped image operates on the opposite side of a patient’s head. An allergy warning is ignored after a clinician clicks away from an annoying pop-up reminder. In the rush to adopt electronic health records and the race to achieve meaningful use, are potentially significant dangers to patients being ignored? Read More »
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Is The 1.5+ Trillion Dollar HITECH Act a Failure?
Hopefully, the public statements made by President Obama and Vice President Biden will lead to a public debate over the monumental problems that the HITECH Act and proprietary EHR vendors have caused the American people. While the press continues to report the figure of $35 billion as the cost of implementing EHRs, that figure does not tell the entire story. Perhaps the next step is to provide accountability and transparency. That would start with firm numbers regarding the real costs of EHR implementations forced on an unprepared healthcare system by the HITECH Act.
- The Future Is Open
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IT Iconoclasts: Experts Offer Dissent On Policy Issues, Technology Implementation
Each month, more hospitals and office-based physicians buy and use electronic medical records and other health information technologies as the U.S. presses on toward achieving the goal first articulated by President George W. Bush in 2004: providing most Americans with access to an electronic medical record within a decade... Read More »
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Obama and Biden Blast EHR Vendors for Data Blocking
As they are winding their terms in office, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden dropped a stink bomb on the health IT industry. Speaking at different events on Friday, January 9th, the President and Vice President both criticized proprietary electronic health record (EHR) vendors as the primary obstacle to the success of their administration’s health care strategy. This is the highest level acknowledgment so far of the serious impact that “lock-in” EHR software vendors are having on America’s medical infrastructure and the ability of physicians to provide medical care.
On the Need for Human-Centered Design in EHRs
Health information technology (HIT) has become the hottest political issue in Washington. The healthcare industry in the United States is facing a crisis as medical facilities have spent hundreds of billions of dollars implementing electronic health record (EHR) systems, yet patients and the physicians and nurses that care for them are seeing few benefits. Congress has been holding hearings focused on detailing the problems and trying to write legislation that will provide a solution to the crisis. The HIT interoperability bill drafted by Rep. Michael C. Burgess (R-TX) is one example. These are welcome first steps. However, none of the bills currently before Congress, and none of the hearings, are addressing the two most important issues facing medical providers today. These are lack of EHR usability, and the inability to have a patients’ entire medical record at the point of care.
Some Doctors Refusing To Adopt Electronic Records
Under a plan first endorsed by President George W. Bush and signed into law by President Obama, the health care industry in the United States has started to change one of the signature elements in doctor's offices — switching chicken-scratched hand-written notes and records to electronic forms. Read More »
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The Flaws Of Electronic Records
Drexel University's Scot Silverstein is a leading critic of the rapid switch to computerized medical charts, saying the notion that they prevent more mistakes than they cause is not proven. Read More »
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UnitedHealth Recalls Digital Health Record Software
UnitedHealth Group Inc. (UNH) has recalled software used in hospital emergency departments in more than 20 states because of an error that caused doctor’s notes about patient prescriptions to drop out of their files. Read More »
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Wall Street Journal: "ObamaCare’s Electronic-Records Debacle"
This Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Op-Ed could have been entitled "President Sucker: Led Down the Garden Path by The Healthcare IT Industry." It is entitled "ObamaCare’s Electronic-Records Debacle", as below. First, though: On Feb. 18, 2009 the WSJ published the following Letter to the Editor authored by me...I have a different view on who is deceiving whom. In fact, it is the government that has been deceived by the HIT industry and its pundits. Stated directly, the administration is deluded about the true difficulty of making large-scale health IT work. The beneficiaries will largely be the IT industry and IT management consultants.
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