When "Human Error" Causes EHR Downtime, Who is Liable For Patient Injuries That Result?

In the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was this story of yet another EHR "glitch":March 9, 2013 12:17 am Human error the cause of UPMC electronic issueA systemwide problem with UPMC's information systems Wednesday left electronic patient records and other data inaccessible for about three hours. A UPMC spokeswoman said the hospitals "immediately went to manual backup systems, and we quickly identified and fixed the problem." She said there was no indication that patient care was compromised by the incident, which was due to human error.I will presume the "human error" was not a physician or nurse pressing the wrong button, but a "human error" involving the servers or IT infrastructure such as a botched system upgrade, action that caused a server room power fault, etc.UMPC is a very large system as their webpage shows, showing approximately fifteen major facilities.The now-expected "patient care has not been compromised" line was provided to the Gazette, a line so commonly heard after EHR outages that I  use it as a Healthcare Renewal indexing tag (see this query link).The following questions arise:What, exactly, was the "human error" and why was there no fault tolerance built into these mission-critical systems to account and compensate for it, such as via redundancy? If paper is so bad as a record-keeping medium that hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent to replace it, then how can patient care not be compromised, especially when multiple hospitals unexpect...
Source: Health Care Renewal - Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Tags: glitch UPMC Patient care has not been compromised healthcare IT difficulties healthcare IT crash Source Type: blogs