US President Barack Obama, almost two years ago, initiated $19 billion in stimulus incentives to convert the nation's hospitals and doctors to using a paperless system of electronic health records. The initiative was aimed at improving quality of care and reducing costs. However, the adaptation is still a slow work in progress, according to a New York Times report.
It has been observed that majority of physicians in small offices continue to track patients' illnesses and other problems with paper and pen. Only about one in four doctors are reportedly using the electronic record system.
The New England Journal of Medicine recently published a report on North Carolina hospitals. According to the report, the thousands of sometimes deadly medical errors tallied by an Institute of Medicine study in 1999 are still all too common, and the electronic record systems are themselves increasingly attracting concerns that computer errors, design flaws and breakdowns in communication sometimes endanger patients. Further, according to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), parts of a patient's electronic medical records have ceased to exist or been saved in the wrong patient's file. The agency further said that incorrect entries have sometimes been posted for drug allergies and blood pressure readings.
The Institute of Medicine has created the Committee on Patient Safety and Health Information Technology to take a fresh look at such concerns. It will run a year-long study and issue recommendations. The 16-member panel met for the first time on December 14, 2010, in Washington.
The ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, recently wrote to the health information industry and to the secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, asking for updates on what was being done to ensure the systems were being reviewed and monitored for patient safety concerns. He also inquired on the role of the FDA in regulating health information technology.
Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, a senior FDA policy and enforcement official, has suggested that FDA regulators could consider different new safety requirements under the agency's authority to assure the safety, effectiveness and quality of medical devices, including software devices.
Dr. David Blumenthal, the Obama administration's national coordinator for health information technology, has said that his office gave the Institute of Medicine $989,000 for the patient safety panel. The panel is led by Gail L. Warden, the former president and chief executive of the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit.
According to the media report, the industry has avoided speaking out on a role for the FDA. The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, a Washington-based industry group, has said that it supports the administration's decision to ask the Institute of Medicine to study this complex issue and report back over the next 12 months.
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