Patient Safety

Preventing EHR-Related Medical Errors at Your Health Center

Preventing EHR-Related Medical Errors at Your Health Center

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past week (and if you have been, no judgment here), you know that an Ebola-infected patient is currently being treated in a Dallas, Texas hospital. (Update: Patient died on Wednesday, October 8th.)

Last Thursday, news was released that the patient was not diagnosed correctly during his initial contact with Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital because of a workflow flaw in the health system’s EHR. The flaw involved the travel history section of the patient record. The patient had mentioned that he had been in Liberia, but this information was only viewable in the section that the nurses accessed, not the physician-accessible section of the record.