• 28
  • October
    2011

According to a paper published by AC Group, a Montgomery-based health IT research and consulting firm, the increase of electronic health records (EHRs) may have the unintended effect of increasing doctors' risk of malpractice suits and increasing malpractice premiums.

The report suggests that, while EHRs may decrease the risk of certain errors, they create new forms of medical liability and uncover other liabilities that already existed by would otherwise remain hidden.

The study looked at 65 ambulatory EHRs which were certified to meet federal standards and found that over 90 percent did not provide "adequate medico-legal training," and that there were specific legal issues in 95 percent of EHRs. In addition, the specific functionality of 42 ambulatory EHRs was examined and it was found that almost 90 percent couldn't provide drug-lab alerts, 80 percent didn't run interaction checking during the prescription refill process, and roughly 60 percent did not automatically update clinical decision support for changes in recommended treatments.

One of the factors involved in the increased liability may be the short deadlines for health care institutions to implement electronic health records systems. Those deadlines may cause EHR vendors to cut corners and rush users through training in how to use the systems.

Those shortfalls may give rise to further liability risks, particularly since there is no requirement that EHRs implement safeguards to check drug orders against lab results or consider social and familial medical history in raising red flags. For example, many EHRs do not create alerts for more frequent mammograms for a female patient whose mother had had breast cancer.

Another problem with EHRs is that they often don't do a good job documenting information doctors are really concerned with.

In our next post, we'll continue looking at this story.

Source: informationweek.com, "Electronic Records May Increase Malpractice Lawsuit Risk," Neil Versel, Oct 25, 2011.