Search results for "Electronic Health Records"

This statewide, retrospective cross-sectional study identified longer than expected length of stay for urgent surgical procedures on the weekend compared to weekdays. Hospitals with electronic operating room scheduling and electronic bed management systems were less likely to demonstrate the weekend effect. These results suggest that health information technology can be employed to mitigate the weekend effect.

A woman with a history of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease underwent hip surgery and experienced shortness of breath postoperatively. A chest radiograph showed a pneumothorax, but the radiologist was unable to locate the first call physician to page about this critical finding.

This electronic audit study examined the incidence of opening and charting in the wrong patient record in the perioperative period. Investigators observed that this error declined over time. They attribute this improvement to time-out procedures and barcoding, both of which facilitate patient identification.

The weekend effect is a well-documented phenomenon where patients admitted over the weekend have inferior outcomes compared to those admitted on a weekday. This retrospective study utilized the AHRQ Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project database and found that specific factors, such as full adoption of electronic health records, home health programs, and increased nurse-to-bed ratios, were associated with overcoming the weekend effect in hospitals.

Many adverse event identification methods cannot detect errors until well after the event has occurred, as they rely on screening administrative data or review of the entire chart after discharge. Electronic medical records (EMRs) offer several potential patient safety advantages, such as decision support for averting medication or diagnostic errors. This study, conducted in the Veterans Affairs system, reports on the successful development of algorithms for screening clinicians' notes within EMRs to detect postoperative complications. The algorithms accurately identified a range of postoperative adverse events, with a lower false negative rate than the Patient Safety Indicators. As the accompanying editorial notes, these results extend the patient safety possibilities of EMRs to potentially allow for real time identification of adverse events.

This study demonstrated the utility of trigger tools to detect adverse events related to outpatient surgery. Venous thromboembolic events and emergency department triggers appeared the most promising to identify and drive improvements.

This cohort study, conducted in an Australian hospital, reports on the implementation of an incident reporting system within an existing anesthesia electronic medical record. Anesthesiologists were required to document any adverse events, in one of 16 predefined categories, as part of their routine clinical documentation. Acceptance of the system was high, and the vast majority of reported adverse events were confirmed by chart review. As prior research has shown that incident reporting systems suffer from low physician reporting rates, integration of incident reporting into routine electronic documentation may help increase physician reports of errors.

This newspaper article reports how a missed test result alert led to a disease-free transplant patient being infected with hepatitis.

Based on preoperative discussions, a patient undergoing knee replacement expected to receive spinal anesthesia; however, general anesthesia was administered, and the records did not note or explain this change. The patient suffered an unusual complication.

An elderly woman who had a DNR in place took a fall that required her to have surgery. Discussion with the patient's health care proxy led to the DNR order being suspended during surgery, with the understanding that it would be reinstated postoperatively. Several days later, a nurse noticed that patient remained 'full code' because the DNR had not been restored.