alert fatigue
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Doctors Are Overloaded with Electronic Alerts, and That’s Bad for Patients
Some people receive constant reminders on their smartphones: birthdays, anniversaries, doctor’s appointments, social engagements. At work, their computers prompt them to meet deadlines, attend meetings and have lunch with the boss. Prodding here and pinging there, these pop-up interruptions can turn into noise to be ignored instead of helpful nudges. Something similar is happening to doctors, nurses and pharmacists. And when they’re hit with too much information, the result can be a health hazard...
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Electronic Health Records: a “Quadruple Win,” a “Quadruple Failure,” or Simply Time for a Reboot?
Just a decade ago, when paper charts were commonplace in the USA, it seemed that electronic health records (EHRs) were destined to transform the quality and efficiency of healthcare delivery, as well as the care experience for patients and clinicians...The reality over the ensuring years has, to put it mildly, not met expectations. According to a 2014 analysis led by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information,2 over 80% of US doctors now use EHRs. Yet, many of the predictions about the benefits of EHRs have yet to materialize to the extent predicted. ..Noteworthy concerns include egregious medical errors resulting from design glitches3, charting templates filled extensively with meaningless boilerplate, the common practice of pasting old notes4 that makes it difficult to know which documentation is “real,” “alert fatigue”5 due to excessive EHR warnings, and even reduced communication among clinical team members.6
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Electronic Health Records: First, Do No Harm?
EHRs are commonly promoted as boosting patient safety, but are we all being fooled? InformationWeek Radio investigates. Read More »
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The Story of How our Health Informatics Textbook Came into Being
I have been asked many times how and why I became interested in Health Informatics and how that led to the writing and self-publication of our textbook, Health Informatics: Practical Guide. The textbook is now in its 7th edition and has been adopted by a large number of universities for their health informatics courses. More co-authors have come on board, and we are now looking at publishing other textbooks. Thus we thought this would be a good point to tell the story.
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Is Digitizing Healthcare Making It Less Safe?
Join InformationWeek Radio on Tuesday, July 1, at 2:00 PM EST for a discussion with Scot M. Silverstein, M.D., a consultant and professor in the Drexel University informatics program who is a leading critic of the claims made for EHR systems and researches the pitfalls of the software and the way it is implemented. He blogs at Health Care Renewal as InformaticsMD. One of the issues he highlights is that there is no systemattic tracking of medical errors associated with functionality or usability issues of EHRs, making it hard to judge whether their net effect has been positive or negative. Yet there are troubling signs, in everything from academic studies to malpractice claims, that the risks of EHRs have been underestimated and the rush to implement these systems may be misguided. Read More »
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