AT: What if your doctor had no clue what he last ordered for you and no ability to order anything else? This is what can happen when an electronic health record (EHR) system crashes.
In 2006, the EHR system at a major hospital crashed. One senior internist, reports the Washington Post, “walked in to find no records on any patients.” He said, “It was like being on the moon without oxygen.” While doctors struggled to keep patients alive, employees from the EHR vendor “ran around with no idea how to work their own equipment.” The internist emphasized, “I didn’t go through all my training to have my ability to take care of patients destroyed by devices that are an impediment to medical care.”
Yet, despite this danger to patients, in 2009 Congress mandated that all doctors and hospitals buy and use EHR systems by January 1, 2014, or face significant financial penalties. Thus, more than 80 percent of physician offices and 99 percent of hospitals use EHRs today.
As doctors and hospitals raced to meet the deadline, shutdowns escalated. In 2011, the EHR system of the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center was shut down for more than 14 hours. The outage affected nearly all its hospitals in the region. Dr. Scot Silverstein told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “What occurred here was a disruptive, potentially dangerous major malfunction of a life-critical enterprise medical device.”
Cerner, an EHR provider, has systems in 3,750 practices and 2,650 hospitals. But in July 2012, its nationwide EHR system was down for several hours. It appears a single keystroke error took down mission- and patient-critical systems. more here
Check out news about the ‘Marina Alta’ hospital in Dénia, Spain (Costa Blanca region). They use the same company, and their server crashed this past week. Chaos, and major data loss.
Electronic records are a joke. Using computers and the internet to send anything sensitive in nature is a joke. I’ve had a discussion in the past with a friend’s wife who works at a bank about the country going cashless. When I asked her what would happen if the system went down she had no answer. I then explained to her that the only plus would be for the government to track all of our spending. She said she had never even considered those scenario’s. People are sheep.
See Singapore’s SingHealth.
Aussies are in for trouble too.
Should have been the only “plus is for the government, to track our spending”. My bad.
There is a storm coming…..
I keep searching and searching and I still can’t find that part of the Constitution that permits the fed govt to have anything to do with medicine, doctors, hospitals, and “health care”.
If you want to see your health care professional go all fish eyed, hand them a USB memory stick and ask for a copy of your records.
This past Wednesday, I saw a new doctor. He took notes by hand, gave me instructions written by hand and also a prescription written by hand! I truly was surprised. And he was a great doctor my GP referred me to.
As a tangent to this story, never reveal if you have firearms. Do not answer (or lie) regarding any questions on firearms ownership. You can be damn sure that some future administration will use it as a registry and a means of confiscation over the most flimsy of “medical reasons”.
Who saw this coming?
My husband recently had surgery and upon admitting him, I asked that a specific record be transferred over from his doctor located IN THE BUILDING NEXT DOOR.
Nope. Can’t do that. We’re not linked to their practice.
Maybe I should’ve asked Akarsh from the Punjab call center to send them over.
Electronic medical records have destroyed the doctor patient relationship. The EMR mandate was simply a way to track doctors work. It does little to improve care and frustrates physicians who are now nothing but data entry clerks.
RE: Ransomware attacks
Computer industry studies have shown that 90% of ransomware breaches are due to phishing-type attacks, where someone opens an email that they have been WARNED not to open. Computers are only as smart as the user.
Health records is just another way to scare grandmas into supporting more meth kids.
What a fcukin racket this shit is
“Computers are only as smart as the user.”
That’s why AOC uses a See ‘N Say.
We were in the hospital with our middle daughter a month ago. Without going into exhaustive detail, her issues are very complicated. The doctors rolled their eyes at me when I gave them history until they realized her records which are supposed to all be connected per EMR and HIPAA actually are not, and I am the only actual clearinghouse of all her information. They did a 180 when they realized what was going on and were tripping over themselves telling me I should write everything down in case something ever happened to me.
So I showed them our records binder, which I had been reciting from memory. A collection of other records. Which they asked to scan into their records.
Get me off this crazy assed carousel, please.