A recent RAND report discussing various innovations within the healthcare industry points out that while electronic health records have been shown to improve patient care, they are also a new source of medical errors.
EHR-related medical errors are a growing cause of medical malpractice claims. Harvard-affiliated CRICO, a medical malpractice insurance group, recently analyzed 147 EHR-related claims to determine the most common causes of the issues.
Results showed the following nine EHR issues to have caused the claims:
- Incorrect information in the EHR (20 percent)
- Hybrid paper record/EHR conversion issues (16 percent)
- System failure — electronic routing of data (12 percent)
- System failure — unable to access data (10 percent)
- Pre-populating/ copy-and-paste errors (10 percent)
- Failure of system design to meet need (9 percent)
- Lack of user training/ education (7 percent)
- Lack of integration/ interoperability (7 percent)
- EHR-related, non-data entry user error (7 percent)
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