Is Your Facility’s Computer System a Patient Safety Risk?
Discussed in this post: “How Often Do EHRs Result in Patient Harm?” (AJN, News, March).
When we first had computers in the hospital—that is, while we still charted on paper but had quick online access to lab, radiology, and pathology results and could easily look up a patient’s prior admission history—it was wonderful. No more little lab slips floating all over the nurses’ station. No more unit-to-unit searches trying to figure out who last had custody of the patient’s X-ray films. (How could objects so large be so easily lost?)
A rocky transition to EHRs.
The transition to almost fully digital charting, on the other hand, has been pretty much a nightmare from the beginning. Nursing was rarely included in initial needs assessments. Many rollouts were chaotic, without additional staffing for the inevitable glitches that are bound to occur. Training of frontline clinical staff has been routinely minimal; we seem to be expected to pick up the many fine points of new software by some kind of digital osmosis.
That elusive clinician friendly EHR.
It’s very clear at this point that electronic health records (EHRs) were designed primarily for data collection and billing purposes. I have yet to see a system that could in any way […]