Information technology-naive defense lawyers vs. " strident critic of electronic health records "
A tale from the trenches.In recent years, as a result of the 2010 IT-related injury and 2011 death of my mother, I have engaged myself as an independent EHR forensic expert regarding evidentiary and patient harm issues in medical malpractice litigation. Interestingly and disappointingly, I still often find that hospital attitudes towards health IT safety and information transparency have changed little since 2010 or, for that matter, the 1990s when I did my postdoc in medical informatics. Hospitals and defense attorneys often (ab)use the lack of technology experience of judges to delay or prevent evidentiary transparency. I ' m thus frequently retained by injured patient ' s attorneys (or attorneys representing the executors of deceased patients ' estates) to help overcome this phenomenon.In doing so, I can find myself under attack in deposition, even before any proceedings begin.For instance, I was recently asked in a deposition, as an attack geared towards injuring my credibility, if an assessment of me published in the literature, that I was a "strident critic of electronic health records" was fair.I replied that it wasnot a fair assessment, that I was a critic ofbad health IT, but juries potentially will hear only the one-liner.I ' d formally defined bad health IT in these pages and at myDrexel medical informatics teaching site as follows:Bad Health IT ( " BHIT " ) is defined as IT that is ill-suited to purpose, hard to use, unreliable, loses data or prov...
Source: Health Care Renewal - Category: Health Management Tags: bad health IT Heathkit H8 Jay Hancock Kaiser Health News medical malpractice PICIS Pulsecheck Source Type: blogs
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