Name: Broken Records: Patients
Uploaded: 2019-03-19
Duration: 6 min 49 s
Description: Electronic Health Records' potential for patient care seemed limitless - but in reality technical and design flaws have led to serious patient risk.

Each and every patient, in the view of the congress believes as I do, the patient has the right to access their own health care, for whatever reason they want. I was stunned when my son for a year was battling stage four glioblastoma. The vice president of the United States of America, a lot of you were very cooperative, couldn't get his records. It was a absolute nightmare. [ MUSIC ] When the government invested all his money and electronic health record, there was tons of excitement, the promise of really transforming medicine for the better. People were so excited about that and what happened with the very quick adoption of electronic health record was some of this software was not actually ready to be implemented in health setting. There're clear benefits, but there're also some challenges and one of these really big challenges was usability and safety. And usability is How effectively efficiently and satisfactorily the technology can be used the core design of [ UNKNOWN ] usability can actually led to direct patient safety consequences. There's a balance on the one hand they're all these positives that could be accomplished through system that really work. But yeah, if you have software breakdowns and nobody's monitoring them closely to make sure that they don't keep happening, you could in fact have very very severe repercussions from that. Tara Delaplane is the mother of Brooke Delaplane who is a 13 year old girl with a number of medical problems who had to make frequent trips to the hospital for treatment. [ UNKNOWN ] was 16 years old, and unfortunately we lost her, but she was just a beautiful soul, absolutely beautiful soul in and out. and she had a very tough life, medically and physically. I couldn't even tell you how many times she was in the hospital in her lifetime. But it was a lot. We had Brooke going in to the hospital for a routine EEG, it's a 24 hour study that will test her brain waves and while we were there The hospital gave her two doses of a probiotic that had dairy in it. And Brooke is severely allergic to dairy. So she had two severe allergy reactions while we were there. She went into complete respiratory distress. Her lung collapsed. And while I was there, and this was going on I was researching on my iPad, what could be happening and I was the one that realized that they gave her a product that had dairy in it. Tara argued that they have this electronic health record system that has in the system somewhere that her daughter was allergic to milk, yet she was given a drug that contained that ingredient. They had said that the milk is an inactive ingredient and they can't warn about everything and that they denied that there was anything wrong with their product, and that was thier position With these sorts of cases it's hard to assign blame. Is this a human error? Can you blame it on the technology that's supposed to be smart enough in flagging allergies? The great hope electronic health records that it would be able to catch these sorts of events. From what we understood, this is not the only hospital that uses this type of software. So it is everywhere, it's nationwide. And it breaks my heart just to think that there are other patients that are going through this. [ MUSIC ] So beyond the safety risks with EHRs, we found that patients really struggle to get their medical records, and that's especially the case when they've had something happen to the hospital and they're trying to get information on what might have happened This EEG is a video and an audio clips of the entire thing and I had recommended that they watch it so that they can see exactly what went on with my daughter. When we tried to get a copy of it, they told us that it was already erased and they only held on to any seizure activity. So we weren't able to get a copy of it. We ended up going to a lawyer. Patients today are expected to be the experts at their care and put it all together and know who to listen to and who to work with and who to find. I think most patients have never seen an electronic health record. It's not something that we think about on a daily basis. Probably not something we want to be thinking about on a daily basis. But because we're starting to see this association between electronic health record usability and safety and potential patient harm there, this is a really important issue. I've yet to find a patient in five years ever get the records [ UNKNOWN ] they were required to do so in electronic format without prolonged litigation of several Leaders to get it. The patient has to be their advocate. Why not give the patient the opportunity to catch something that somebody missed? Patients struggle to get their medical records for several reaons. For hospitals it's not in their best business interest to share records, that's what a lot of people argue. they want to keep their patients within the system and that makes them hesitant to share patient data with other hospitals. The other issue is hospitals don't love to talk about safety issues within their walls. But in reality the reason why patients really struggle to get their health record is a mystery it was something that Widespread option VHR's are supposed to make happen and we have yet to see it. Electronic data it seems like it would be so promising on so many levels. I know for us we were hoping that we would have one focal point that would bring all of Brooke's records together from so many specailists. But it proved to be that we really couldn't get access to all of that. So I still think there's such a long way to go in terms of electronic data for anyone that walks through those doors. They deserve to be protected and they deserve better treatment than what my daughter had in those two days. [ MUSIC ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Broken Records: Patients

Health

Electronic Health Records' potential for patient care seemed limitless - but in reality technical and design flaws have led to serious patient risk.