EHRs Dramatically Improve Patient Records

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

A study conducted in Pennsylvania hospitals showed a 27 percent reduction in patient safety errors with advanced electronic health record use.

The ONC reports providers with Meaningful Use-enabled electronic health records (EHRs) reported their practices were more likely to generate general alerts and reminders that improve patient care. This technology also led to a 27 percent decline in all (aggregated) events, a 30 percent decline in medication events, and a 25 percent decline in complication of procedure test, or treatment.

Now, a study from Carnegie Mellon University and the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority (PSA) has found yet again EHR use leads to reduced errors in the patient record. According to Health IT Analytics, up to 98,000 people die every year from preventable medical errors. The study found advanced EHR systems lead to a 27 percent reduction in patient safety errors.

“Health information technology is widely considered part of the solution to improving the safety of healthcare in the United States,” write Muhammad Zia Hydari and Rahul Telang of Carnegie Mellon and William M. Marella from the PSA. “The question of interest is whether hospitals’ adoption of health IT has matched expectations and improved patient safety.”

“As our study shows, improvement in patient safety is an additional benefit of advanced EHR adoption that non-adopting hospitals should take into account when evaluating IT investments,” the study concludes. “Policy makers, who expected improvement in patient safety due to EHRs, may find validation for their expectations. Although we do not separate out patient safety events, to focus on new events introduced by health IT or historically existing errors exacerbated by health IT, we find in aggregate counts that there is an overall improvement in patient safety from the adoption of advanced EHRs.”