Plans to ensure patient safety as the nation transitioned to electronic health records have yet to come to fruition a decade later, according to a new report. From an investigation: In fall 2009, several dozen of the best minds in health information technology huddled at a hotel outside Washington, D.C., to discuss potential dangers of an Obama White House plan to spend billions of tax dollars computerizing medical records. The health data geeks trusted that transitioning from paper to electronic records would cut down on medical errors, help identify new cures for disease and give patients an easy way to track their health care histories. But after two days of discussions, the group warned that few safeguards existed to protect the public from possible consequences of rolling out the new technology so quickly. Because this software tracks the medicines people take and their vital signs, even a tiny error or omission, or a doctor’s inability to access the file quickly, can be a matter of life or death. The experts at that September 2009 meeting, mainly members of the American Medical Informatics Association, or AMIA, agreed that safety should be a top priority as federal officials poured more than $30 billion into subsidies to wire up medical offices and hospitals nationwide. The group envisioned creating a national databank to track reports of deaths, injuries and near misses linked to issues with the new technology. It never happened.

Instead, plans for putting patient safety first — and for building a comprehensive injury reporting and reviewing system — have stalled for nearly a decade, because manufacturers of electronic health records (EHRs), health care providers, federal health care policy wonks, academics and Congress have either blocked the effort or fought over how to do it properly, an ongoing investigation by Fortune and Kaiser Health News shows. Over the past 10 years, the parties have squabbled over how best to collect injury data, over who has the power to require it, over who should pay for it, and over whether to make public damning findings and the names of those responsible for safety problems. In 2015, members of Congress derailed a long-planned EHR safety center, first by challenging the government’s authority to create it and later by declining to fund it. A year later, Congress stripped the Food and Drug Administration of its power to regulate the industry or even to track malfunctions and injuries.

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Source: Slashdot – How Lax Oversight Of Electronic Health Records Puts Patients At Risk