Search results for "Electronic Health Records"

Prior to undergoing a CT scan, a patient with no allergies documented in the electronic health record (EHR) described a history of hives after receiving contrast. During a follow-up clinic visit, the patient inquired whether this contrast reaction was listed in the EHR. Investigation revealed that it had been removed from the patient's profile, thus leaving the record with no evidence of allergy to contrast.

Alert fatigue is recognized as a barrier to patient safety and may particularly increase risks associated with medication prescribing. This study examined the frequency of manual overrides of alerts for medication allergies over a 10-year period. Clinicians were required to provide a reason for overriding the allergy alert. As with earlier studies, the rate of overrides was very high. Researchers determined that the alerts were irrelevant in more than half the cases. Providers also were more likely to override repeated alerts compared with new alerts. These results highlight the overuse of alerts in health care settings and the need to improve their use to effectively support patient safety.

After leaving Hospital X against medical advice, a man with paraplegia presented to the emergency department of Hospital Y with pain and fever. The patient was diagnosed with sepsis and admitted to Hospital Y for management. In the night, the nurse found the patient unresponsive and called a code blue. The patient was resuscitated and transferred to the ICU, where physicians determined that the arrest was due to acute rupturing of his red blood cells (hemolysis), presumably caused by a reaction to the antibiotic. Later that day, the patient's records arrived from three hospitals where he had been treated recently. One record noted that he had previously experienced a life-threatening allergic reaction to the antibiotic, which was new information for the providers at Hospital Y.