Healthcare providers with poor medical software training often rely on EHR workarounds, which can pose a threat to patient safety. Better training could reduce their occurrence.
Electronic health record (EHR) software can offer many benefits to physicians and their patients, such as improved care quality and patient safety, greater efficiency, and better clinical workflow; but it can also lead to unintended and undesirable consequences – sometimes due to flaws in the medical software and other times due to insufficient training.
One such consequence is the use of shortcuts, or workarounds. Physicians and staff use these for many different reasons – in some cases, due to an overreliance on paper-based workflow and other times due to complex EHR software processes that it is easier to bypass and do a different way. Though some workarounds are truly harmless, others can lead to unintended consequences of their own, some of which include medication errors and missed alerts, incomplete health records, and oversights in patient care.
According to a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, healthcare professionals increasingly rely on workarounds in order to deal with perceived inadequacies or weaknesses in their medical software.
Another problem, however, is the fact that many healthcare professionals use EHR shortcuts because they are easier; physicians and staff are already accustomed to paper-based workflow; and new EHR processes are often complicated to learn.
Examples of commonly used, paper-based workarounds include:
- Writing vital signs and other health screening data on paper to be entered later into the EHR, in order to save time.
- Writing notes about test results or other pertinent patient data on paper for the physician to have in front of them during an exam.
- Writing reminders on post-it notes or scrap pieces of paper for tasks that need to be completed in the future.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
With proper training and a willingness to modify existing workflow, physicians could eliminate many of these workarounds and reduce the risk of negatively impacting patient care.
For example, entering data directly into the EHR software at the point of care ensures that patient health records are complete. Furthermore, referencing test results in the EHR rather than relying on paper notes ensures that the data the physician is looking at is accurate and belongs to the correct patient. More importantly, scheduling reminders through the EHR ensures that important tasks are actually completed and not forgotten due to paper notes being lost or thrown away.
Though not all EHR shortcuts are bad, they should be avoided whenever possible in order to prevent unintended harm to patients. Selecting the right EHR system can affect whether risky shortcuts are even necessary – and the right software can even help practices improve efficiency and streamline workflow. Physicians who still choose to incorporate workarounds into their workflow should analyze each process carefully to ensure that patients are not being put at risk.
