Malpractice By Electronic Health Record
Arthur Allen of Politico exposes yet another reason for doctors to fear Electronic Health Records: Their errors lead to lawsuits:
Medical errors that can be traced to the automation of the U.S. health care system are increasingly an issue in medical malpractice lawsuits.
Some of the doctors, attorneys and health IT experts involved in the litigation fear that safety and data integrity problems could undercut the benefits of electronic health records unless HHS and Congress address them aggressively.
“This is kind of like the car industry in Detroit in 1965,” says physician Michael Victoroff, a liability expert and a critic of the federal program encouraging providers to adopt EHRs. “We’re making gigantic, horrendous, unsafe machines with no seat belts, and they are selling like hot cakes.
Readers of this blog know why they are selling despite their serious flaws: The government has thrown almost $30 billion at hospitals and physicians to cause them to buy them.
Yes, this is such a problem that malpractice seminars for doctors devote a large amount of time to it.
Another reason why malpractice reform would have been nice with the so-called “healthcare reform”.
Thank you. I am not actually a big fan of Congress getting involved in medical malpractice, when states have good examples of what works from other states.