When Scot Silverstein’s 84-year-old mother, Betty, starting mixing up her words, he worried she was having a stroke. So he rushed her to Abington Memorial Hospital in Pennsylvania.
After she was admitted, Silverstein, who is a doctor, looked at his mother’s electronic health records, which are designed to make medical care safer by providing more information on patients than paper files do.He saw that Sotalol, which controls rapid heartbeats, was correctly listed as one of her medications.
Days later, when her heart condition flared up, he re-examined her records and was stunned to see that the drug was no longer listed, he said.
His mom later suffered clotting, hemorrhaged and required emergency brain surgery. She died in 2011. Silverstein blames her death on problems with the hospital’s electronic medical records.
“I had the indignity of watching them put her in a body bag and put her in a hearse in my driveway,” said Silverstein, who has filed a wrongful-death lawsuit. “If paper records had been in place, unless someone had been using disappearing ink, this would not have happened.”
Source: Bloomberg via Market Ticker
Three risks common to both paper and electronic records include include: 1) the risk of inappropriate access, 2) the risk of record tempering, and 3) the risk of record loss due to natural catastrophes.
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With electronic records, inappropriate access manifests itself in one of two ways: 1) an unauthorized user gains access to the EHR data; or 2) an authorized user violates the appropriate use conditions. For example, if office staff access the records of a friend or colleague that visited the practice. Electronic records can be subject to ‘serendipitous’ access in situations such as when a user account is left open or a passerby is able to view data on the screen or manipulate the EHR features. Electronic records can also be subject to breaches of network security that may allow a hacker to gain access to user credentials and thereby to bypass the access control protections.
The ability to make changes to an electronic record depends upon the rights assigned to a user. Users with data modification privileges can generally add, delete, or modify data or entire records. Data can also be tampered with by directly accessing the files stored on the EHR servers using a server account rather than an EHR user account.
Fires, floods or other environmental disasters attack physical locations and can result in the complete loss of both paper and electronic medical records.