In June, computers at a Midwestern hospital chain suddenly began swapping medical records, causing doctors to put the wrong information into patients’ files. Less than two weeks later, the hospital company discovered that its nurses were not receiving digital pharmacy orders, prompting a four-hour shutdown of the electronic database serving 10 hospitals.
The Michigan-based chain, Trinity Health System, blamed the problems on a “technician error” and “coding issue” in its $400-million computer system.
No one was hurt, but the incidents highlighted how even the smallest computer glitch could threaten the accuracy and timeliness of information used by doctors and nurses to treat patients.
The Obama administration is in the midst of a $27 billion dollar push for every patient to have a digital record file by 2014, arguing that consistent and updated records will reduce paperwork errors and promote patient safety.
Absent from the effort, however, are safeguards to prevent, report and fix electronic glitches that might put patients at risk, The Huffington Post Investigative Fund reports.
“People just assume that computers will make things safer,” said Nancy Leveson, a safety engineering expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “While they can be designed to eliminate certain kinds of hazards, they increase others and sometimes they introduce new types of hazards.”
Federal officials differ on the seriousness of the issue. In late February, FDA official Jeffrey Shuren linked six deaths and more than 200 injuries to health information technology problems, describing the casualties as only the “tip of the iceberg” because his numbers were based on mostly voluntary reports. But David Blumenthal, who directs the Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information, said nothing in the “anecdotal and fragmentary” report justified safety oversight.
Then, in July, Blumenthal’s office unveiled its digital records plan without any of the safety and quality standards suggested by the FDA earlier this year, such as mandatory reporting of “adverse events.”
Critics say the government needs to work more closely with industry to improve the software because it puts patients at risk. For example, some systems, experts said, have too many built-in alarms, prompting doctors to ignore them or turn them off.
For more than two decades, however, the technology industry has resisted efforts to report and track design flaws, arguing that the software is already far superior to paper and that regulations would “stifle innovation,” according to a review of documents by the Investigative Fund.
