News released last week suggests this is may be the case.
The study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, trumpeted that of the doctors who used electronic medical systems, “6.1 percent had a record of paid malpractice claims compared with 10.8 percent of physicians who did not use an EHR.”
In lieu of the lack of any improved patient outcome data associated with EHRs, proponents are trying to find additional carrots for doctors to make the jump to digital adoption.
Not so fast, says Dr. RW, who points out that after “controlling for sex, race, year of medical school graduation, specialty, and practice size, the relationship between EHR adoption and paid malpractice settlements was of smaller magnitude and no longer statistically significant.”
It was a good try though.
Related posts:
- Do electronic medical records raise malpractice risk?
- Does telemedicine reduce malpractice risk?
- Electronic records are supposed to reduce medical errors, right?
- Can Wal-Mart help doctors implement electronic medical records?
- The New York Times finally gets it on electronic medical records
- Most hospitals still use paper records, and why money alone won’t solve the electronic medical record problem
- Paying doctors by the hour will increase the adoption of electronic medical records
{ 2 comments }
As a family practitioner, I am disgusted that my own organization, the AAFP, does not do a better job of presenting the data.
Stop drinking the kool-aid.
EMR’s are nice, but they are far from a panacea for all that ails medicine. A lot of this hype is generated by makers of EMR’s that stand to make alot of money, although have little motivation to cooperate with each other, ie make their products “inter-operable”.
By the way, my office has had an EMR since 2004.
I freely admit I’m a documenting moron. But when I was a 3rd year rotating through Family medicine, I looked like a stud when I had to turn in anonomized clinic notes for grading. The reason? The multispecialty practice I was at had an EMR that wrote up mad-lib type notes based on a cc or how long/what level the visit was.
A monkey could have charted with this thing; it even reminded me to ask about side effects if a patient had gotten a new drug added recently.
I don’t think the EMR led me to better dx or tx (although it would offer helpful A/P text I could crib) but I am certain that if any of those charts showed up in court, there’s way less chance I’d get tripped up by failing to document the risk of driving while on ambien or something equally stupid.
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