Obamacare penalizes health-care providers that don’t shift to electronic records, and it funds statewide exchanges to share the records. The goal is that digitization will eventually allow patient information to quickly synchronize between pharmacies, doctors’ offices, hospitals, and data suppliers, so that a person who normally picks up a medication in San Francisco could get the needed drug if she were to become comatose in a Los Angeles emergency room.
However, the emergence of shared medical records makes errors all the more dangerous because they can propagate more easily between providers.
Bloomberg reported in 2013 on an 84-year-old woman whose family blames her death at an Abington, Pa., hospital on problems with her electronic health record, which inexplicably dropped a critical heart medication after she was admitted. Scot Silverstein, the woman’s son, filed a lawsuit against Abington Memorial Hospital, which is still pending. The hospital, which is fighting the allegations, declined to comment.
In 2010, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs took a key feature of its electronic health-records system offline after physicians found the system was slotting medication histories into the wrong patients’ files. The problem was discovered when a doctor noticed that a female patient’s record mistakenly showed a prescription for vardenafil, a drug used to treat erectile dysfunction, according to government documents obtained by Bloomberg.
The Veterans Affairs system for accessing Department of Defense medical records electronically and sharing the records between facilities was disabled for three months until technicians could implement a fix. The Veterans Affairs didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Problems extend outside the U.S. In Australia, a hospital sent the wrong discharge files to physicians in 2011, mixing up patients’ diagnoses and test results.
Americans file thousands of complaints a year to HHS claiming privacy violations, said Deven McGraw, deputy director for health-information privacy at the health department’s Office for Civil Rights. Many patients protest when they discover that their information is shared with third parties; a frequent target is survey companies, which send detailed questionnaires about treatment to people’s homes.
The business of providing and securing payment for health care involves potentially hundreds of thousands of entities around the country, said McGraw. Each company must comply with U.S. law covering the secure storage and transfer of electronic data, she said.
McGraw encourages patients to request copies of their health records from local providers to ensure accuracy. HHS audits health-care companies’ compliance with privacy and security rules, but knowing where to look for potential problems is difficult.
“Like any law enforcement agency, we need to know about violations so that we can help address any issues,” McGraw said. “And, of course, like all agencies, we have limited resources to work with, so we need to make sure that we’re maximizing our enforcement efforts.”