By Shefali Luthra | February 27, 2016
"The mouse slips, and the emergency room doctor clicks on the wrong number, ordering a medication dosage that's far too large. Elsewhere, in another ER's electronic health record, a patient's name isn't clearly displayed, so the nurse misses it and enters symptoms in the wrong person's file.
As ER doctors and nurses grapple with the transition to digitized record systems, these mistakes seem to be happening more frequently. “There are new categories of patient safety errors” in emergency rooms that didn't exist before the push to use electronic record systems, said Raj Ratwani, scientific director at MedStar Health's National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare in Washington, D.C.
MH TAKEAWAYS
Poorly designed electronic health record systems are prone to human error, especially in fast-paced emergency room settings."