Patient Photos Integrated into EHRs, Causing Reduction in Medication Errors

One of the key elements of healthcare is ensuring that patients receive the proper meds and not those ordered for others. Medication errors are not uncommon so various measures have been used to help prevent such errors (see:Medication Errors and Adverse Drug Events). A recent article discussed the simple idea of placing a photo of a patient in the EHR and discusses how this simple measure appears to have been effective in curtailing mistakes (see:Patient Photo on Health Record Curtails Medication Errors). Below is an excerpt from the article:The idea is simple — display a photo at the top of an electronic health record, visible at all times, alongside the patient's name, age, and medical record number — and physicians are less likely to make"wrong patient" medication errors....In their pilot study conducted in the emergency department of a large urban academic medical center, registration staff took photos of consenting patients when they checked in. The team then assessed orders placed using electronic health records....With the retract-and-reorder tool, they could see"near-miss events" in which a physician retracts an order and then applies the same order to another patient within a 10-minute timeframe. During the study period, the researchers identified 312 retract-and-reorder events. Such events were more frequent in records without a photo than with a photo....[I]interruptions likely play a role in the occurrence of wrong-patient order-entry ...

Source: Lab Soft News - December 5, 2019 Category: Laboratory Medicine Authors: Bruce Friedman Tags: Electronic Health Record (EHR) Healthcare Information Technology Medical Consumerism Public Health Quality of Care Source Type: blogs