The U.S. authorities claimed that ditching paper medical charts for digital information would make well being care higher, safer and cheaper. Ten years and $36 billion later, the digital revolution has gone awry.
A KHN and Fortune investigation discovered:
Patient hurt: Electronic well being information have created a number of dangers to affected person security. Alarming experiences of deaths, severe accidents and close to misses — hundreds of them — tied to software program glitches, person errors or different system flaws have piled up for years in authorities and personal repositories. Yet no central database exists to compile and examine these incidents to enhance security.
Signs of fraud: Federal officers say the software program will be misused to overcharge, a apply often known as “upcoding.” Some medical doctors and well being methods are alleged to have overstated their use of the brand new know-how, a doubtlessly huge fraud in opposition to Medicare and Medicaid more likely to take years to unravel. Two software program makers have paid a complete of greater than $200 million to settle fraud allegations.
Gaps in interoperability: Proponents of digital well being information anticipated a seamless system so sufferers might share computerized medical histories in a flash with medical doctors and hospitals wherever within the nation. That has but to materialize, largely as a result of officers allowed a whole lot of competing companies to promote medical information software program unable to change info.
Doctor burnout: Many medical doctors say they spend half their day or extra clicking pulldown menus and typing somewhat than interacting with sufferers. An emergency room physician will be saddled with making as much as four,000 mouse clicks per shift. This has fueled issues about physician burnout, which in January the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Massachusetts Medical Society referred to as a “public health crisis.”
Web of secrets and techniques: Entrenched insurance policies proceed to maintain software program failures out of public view. Vendors of digital well being information have imposed contractual “gag clauses” that discourage patrons from talking out about questions of safety and disastrous software program installations — and a few hospitals combat to withhold information from injured sufferers or their households.
For an in-depth examination of digital well being information, learn “Death By 1,000 Clicks: Where Electronic Health Records Went Wrong.”
Fred Schulte: fschulte@kff.org”>fschulte@kff.org, @fredschulte
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