After a recent Center for Public Integrity series and New York Times story on EHR-related upcoding, the New York times does so again. This blog is cited:
October 8, 2012
The Ups and Downs of Electronic Medical Records
New York Times
By MILT FREUDENHEIM
The case for electronic medical records is compelling: They can make health care more efficient and less expensive, and improve the quality of care by making patients’ medical history easily accessible to all who treat them.
Small wonder that the idea has been promoted by the Obama administration, with strong bipartisan and industry support. The government has given $6.5 billion in incentives, and hospitals and doctors have spent billions more.
But as health care providers adopt electronic records, the challenges have proved daunting, with a potential for mix-ups and confusion that can be frustrating, costly and even dangerous.
"Dangerous" is the concept that has been most lacking in public debate. Through my many years of writing on health IT difficulties and more recently my legal work, I know of injuries and deaths caused or contributed to by bad health IT (e.g., see here and here). I experienced a tragedy in my own family as well.
The New York Times has done a significant public service in mentioning this critical issue, long hushed by the hyper-enthusiasts to whom computers seem to hold more rights than people, and to whom plans for a "cybernetic healthcare utopia" override long held principles and standards for human subject research protections.
Some doctors complain that the electronic systems are clunky and time-consuming, designed more for bureaucrats than physicians. Last month, for example, the public health system in Contra Costa County in California slowed to a crawl under a new information-technology system.
Doctors told county supervisors they were able to see only half as many patients as usual as they struggled with the unfamiliar screens and clicks. Nurses had similar concerns. At the county jail, they said, a mistaken order for a high dose of a dangerous heart medicine was caught just in time.
That scenario, not at all unique (e.g., see New York Times, "Designed for Efficiency, New Computer Software at Health Dept. Misfires", Nov. 2010 and my comments here), is a warning that the technology needs significant work and cannot just be rammed into place.
The first national coordinator for health information technology, Dr. David J. Brailer, was appointed in 2004, by President George W. Bush. Dr. Brailer encouraged the beginnings of the switch from paper charts to computers. But in an interview last month, he said: “The current information tools are still difficult to set up. They are hard to use. They fit only parts of what doctors do, and not the rest.”
Refreshing candor that should be coming from the present ONC leader, not the two-generations-ago former incumbent.
Like all computerized systems, electronic records are vulnerable to crashes. Parts of the system at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center were down recently for six hours over two days; the hospital had an alternate database that kept patients’ histories available until the problem was fixed.
Those crashes are also not uncommon. See for instance my posts on the common refrain when that happens that "patient care has not been compromised" (query link).
Even the internationally respected Mayo Clinic, which treats more than a million patients a year, has serious unresolved problems after working for years to get its three major electronic records systems to talk to one another. Dr. Dawn S. Milliner, the chief medical informatics officer at Mayo, said her people were “working actively on a number of fronts” to make the systems “interoperable” but acknowledged, “We have not solved that yet.”
Perhaps the worst example of that phenomenon is the DoD-VA interface debacle. See my apparently popular (based on "hits") March 2010 post "VA / DoD EHR Interface Debacle: Will It Take the Luminosity Of A Dozen Supernovas To Shed Light On The Obvious About Healthcare IT?"
Still, Dr. Milliner added that even though there a lot of challenges, the benefits of information technology are “enormous” — improved safety and quality of care, convenience for patients and better outcomes in general.
Enormous? It is quite clear that this has not been proven in the real world with large scale health IT, especially in its present form. It may be the case that the improvements will be modest at best. Many if not most healthcare problems may not be related to documentation at all (see my Dec. 2010 post "Is Healthcare IT a Solution to the Wrong Problem?" for instance). Also, as I've written, a good or even fair paper record system is better for patients than BHIT (bad health IT).
In the rare event that a large-scale system goes down at Mayo, backup measures are ready, teams are called in to make rapid repairs, and if necessary “everyone is ready to go on paper,” Dr. Milliner said.
Paper records do not unexpectedly "go down" en masse.
Reliable data about problems in the electronic systems is hard to come by, hidden by a virtual code of silence enforced by fears of lawsuits and bad publicity. A recent study commissioned by the government sketches the magnitude of the problem, calling for tools to report problems and to prevent them.
"Omertà " is perhaps the best term of art for this form of silence...
Based on error rates in other industries, the report estimates that if and when electronic health records are fully adopted, they could be linked to at least 60,000 adverse events a year.
My own estimates are much higher if the technology and its industry are not first drastically reformed, as in my April 2010 post "If The Benefits Of Healthcare IT Can Be Guesstimated, So Can And Should The Dangers."
The Obama administration will issue a report on patient safety issues in early November, the current national coordinator, Dr. Farzad Mostashari, said in an interview. That report was requested last year by a panel on health I.T. safety at the Institute of Medicine, a unit of the National Academies of Science.
Considering the available data is limited, as per the FDA and IOM itself (see addendum here), the report should be immediately suspect for underestimation/cheerleading if not whitewashing.
... Elisabeth Belmont, a lawyer for the MaineHealth system, based in Portland, advises hospitals to reject contract language that could leave them responsible for settling claims for patient injuries caused by software problems.
The IT industry is quite mature and no longer merits such special accommodation. As in other industries, liability should be covered by the industry itself, not by customers (and patient victims). See "No More Soft Landings for Software: Liability for Defects in an Industry That Has Come of Age", Frances E. Zollers, Andrew McMullin, Sandra N. Hurd, and Peter Shears, Santa Clara Computer & High Technology Law Journal, May 2005.
The institute also recommended that software manufacturers be required to report deaths, serious injuries or unsafe conditions related to information technology. So far, however, neither a new safety agency nor such a reporting system has been adopted. Some of the largest software companies have opposed any mandatory reporting requirement.
Post market surveillance is standard for other medical device sectors and the pharma industry, as well as other mission critical IT sectors. The continuing, remarkable special accommodation for health IT is unearned, unjustified and ethically inexplicable.
Critics are deeply skeptical that electronic records are ready for prime time. “The technology is being pushed, with no good scientific basis,” said Dr. Scot M. Silverstein, a health I.T. expert at Drexel University who reports on medical records problems on the blog Health Care Renewal. He says testing these systems on patients without their consent “raises ethical questions.”In other words, while I am an advocate for good health IT, the technology is not yet ready to be pushed nationally. Bad health IT prevails. From my Medical Informatics teaching site:
Good Health IT ("GHIT") is defined as IT that provides a good user experience, enhances cognitive function, puts essential information as effortlessly as possible into the physician’s hands, keeps eHealth information secure, protects patient privacy and facilitates better practice of medicine and better outcomes.
Bad Health IT ("BHIT") is defined as IT that is ill-suited to purpose, hard to use, unreliable, loses data or provides incorrect data, causes cognitive overload, slows rather than facilitates users, lacks appropriate alerts, creates the need for hypervigilance (i.e., towards avoiding IT-related mishaps) that increases stress, is lacking in security, compromises patient privacy or otherwise demonstrates suboptimal design and/or implementation.
(I would replace the term "critic" with "realist" and/or "patient rights advocate.")
Another critic, Dr. Scott A. Monteith [who has guest-posted at this blog - ed.], a psychiatrist and health I.T. consultant in Michigan, notes that Medicare and insurance companies generally do not pay for experimental treatments that have not proved their effectiveness ... Dr. Monteith said the electronic systems were “disrupting traditional medical records and, beyond that, how we think” — the process of arriving at a diagnosis. For example, the diagnosing process can include “looking at six pieces of paper,” he said. “We cannot do that on a monitor. It really affects how we think.”
The systems are disruptive due to the paradigm changes, made far worse by their also often being mission hostile in design.
“The problem is each patient is an individual,” said Ms. Burger, who is president of the California Nurses Association. “We need the ability to change that care plan, based on age and sex and other factors.” She acknowledged that the system had one advantage: overcoming the ancient problem of bad handwriting. “It makes it easier for me to read progress notes that physicians have written, and vice versa,” she said.
While this is true, it is also true that the loss of context and structure produces legible gibberish that does not relate the patient narrative well. Also, the same legibility improvement could be obtained via word processors - or typewriters - that cost far less than the tens of millions of dollars or more per organization that clinical IT commonly costs.
Some experts said they were hopeful that the initial problems with electronic records would be settled over time.
I'm one of them. Without major health IT industry reforms, however, including strict adherence to evidence-based practices (as that selfsame industry sector demands of medicine and ironically and hypocritically claims its products will enable), I don't expect to see the problems settled in my lifetime.
Dr. Brailer, who now heads Health Evolution Partners, a venture capital firm in San Francisco, said that “most of the clunky first-generation tools” would be replaced in 10 years. “As the industry continues to grind forward, costs will go down,” he said.
One should ask - why are 'first generation' tools still in abundance, decades into the healthcare information technology industry? Further, as the industry "grinds forward" without oversight and patient protections, people will be injured.
Mark V. Pauly, professor of health care management at the Wharton School, said the health I.T. industry was moving in the right direction but that it had a long way to go before it would save real money. “Like so many other things in health care,” Dr. Pauly said, “the amount of accomplishment is well short of the amount of cheerleading.”
That is an understatement.
(Not covered in this article perhaps due to limited space are the issues of information security, privacy and confidentiality that are compromised by current clinical IT.)
In conclusion, it is good that the New York Times has brought the downsides into the public eye. While the technology's not "ready for prime time", a story like this is ready for prime time, and is in fact long overdue:
-- SS
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