Design of Electronic Health Records and Med Mal

On March 6th, Sharon McQuown addressed the ABA's Health Law Section on emerging issues in health care law and discussed the impact of EHR (electronic health records) on med mal litigation.  Specifically, she discussed how the design of EHR could have helped avoid the misdiagnosis of Ebola in a Texas hospital.  Shortly after the patient died, the hospital instituted EHR changes, including:   

• Adding a new tool in the EHR requiring a "hard stop confirmation" by the physician that he/she had been told that the patient had recently been to a country of concern
• Creating a more robust screen that draws attention to travel with a red box on top and specific identification of countries traveled
• Adding a banner alert screen if a patient is flagged for infectious disease with an alert of steps to be immediately taken
• Changing the discharge process so that discharge papers could no longer be printed early or if anything was unresolved in the document.

Fierce EMR has the story.