Search results for "Electronic Health Records"

The design of electronic medical record (EMR) interfaces according to human factors engineering principles is crucial to ensuring clinicians' ability to access and process data rapidly. This usability study compared a custom-designed interface with a standard off-the-shelf EMR, and found that intensive care unit physicians were able to complete patient care tasks rapidly and with greater accuracy using an interface designed with provider workflow in mind.

Interdisciplinary teamwork is a primary driver of safety culture, and lack of teamwork has been linked to poor clinical outcomes in surgery and the emergency department. Creating high-functioning teams is challenging in inpatient medicine wards, due to numerous barriers including variability in physician and nurse schedules and communication styles. This study, which built on prior work by the same authors, sought to improve interdisciplinary teamwork at a teaching hospital by creating structured, daily rounds where the entire care team discussed patients. The intervention resulted in a significant decrease in preventable adverse events compared with historical and concurrent controls. The accompanying editorial notes that the hospital where this study was conducted had several structural features that also encouraged interdisciplinary communication (such as an electronic health record), and that structured interdisciplinary rounds could have an even larger impact at hospitals lacking such features.

None of the providers directly involved in caring for hospitalized elderly patients—nurses, physicians, or case managers—were able to accurately predict the likelihood that these patients would be readmitted within 30 days of discharge.

A considerable number of patients suffer preventable harm due to diagnostic errors every year. Our knowledge of underlying causes of missed diagnoses, and the types of diagnoses that are often missed, are largely based on autopsy studies and data from malpractice claims, which may over-represent diagnoses that cause death or serious disability. The 1300 pediatricians and pediatric trainees surveyed in this study identified misdiagnosis of viral illnesses as bacterial infections and failure to recognize medication side effects as the most common types of diagnostic error. Faulty information gathering and suboptimal communication were named as the principal individual and system factors leading to diagnostic error. Physicians named closer follow-up and reliable test management systems as major system improvements that could reduce the risk of diagnostic error.