EHR Copy Feature Has Promoted " Note-Bloat " ; Vendors, Hospitals Seek Solutions

EHRs have brought many benefits to physicians and hospitals but also problems such asnote-bloat. This latter problem is caused by physicians copying and pasting data from a patient's older record rather than manually generated new information. I have covered this problem in a number of previous notes (see, for example:Copy-and-Paste Errors with EHRs; Some Possible Solutions to the Problem). A recent study documented the magnitude of this problems (see:EHRs are overflowing with copy-and-paste records, JAMA study shows). Below is an excerpt from the article:For all the benefits brought about by electronic health records, it's long been known that they have their pitfalls, whether it's ungainly user experience or agita caused by alert fatigue.Another major risk for EHRs is the temptation toward"note bloat" caused by caregivers' easy ability to copy-and-paste data from other parts of the chart. This defeats the purpose of electronic documentation, of course, creating a large and unwieldy record that can be hard to make sense of ....Researchers at University of California San Francisco took a look at thousands of progress notes, written by nearly 500 clinicians over eight months in UCSF Medical Center's inpatient Epic EHR.They found that only a small minority of them were manually entered – but more than 80 percent of the notes were imported or copied from elsewhere.....[A] recent software update to Epic allowed the UCSF team to examine the ch...
Source: Lab Soft News - Category: Laboratory Medicine Authors: Tags: Electronic Health Record (EHR) Healthcare Information Technology Medical Ethics Medical Research Quality of Care Source Type: blogs