We might still not know the extent of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, had an enterprising pediatrician not had access to electronic medical records.
With the help of the Epic Systems EMR at Hurley Medical Center in Flint, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha pulled results of blood tests on more than 700 children from 2013 and a similar patient pool from 2015. Flint switched its water supply in April 2014.
Hanna-Attisha found that twice as many in the 2015 group had elevated lead levels in their blood than in the earlier sample, according to the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, near Epic’s home base in Verona, Wisconsin. The difference was even greater for children in the inner city, where the water was most contaminated.
“It directly correlated with the water lead levels,” Hanna-Attisha is quoted as saying.
“If we did not have Epic, if we did not have EMRs, if we were still on paper, it would have taken forever to get these results,” Hanna-Attisha added.
As the story goes, researchers from Virginia Tech last September first reported high levels of lead in the drinking water in Flint, which has come from the Flint River since the 2014 changeover. Hanna-Attisha immediately went to work, cross-referencing blood test results in the with patient home addresses, with the help of geographic information software.
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.
Since Hanna-Attisha’s discovery last fall, Hurley has started putting lead alerts in the medical records of children who drink Flint’s water so physicians can watch for changes, since symptoms often don’t develop for several years, the Wisconsin State Journal reported. “It will help us track these patients in the future to see how they are doing,” Hanna-Attisha told the newspaper.
This is an advantage of a well-implemented and properly applied EMR. Contrast this to the first reported case of Ebola in the U.S., at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, in September 2014. The hospital initially blamed Epic for misdiagnosing the patient, saying that physicians had no idea he had traveled to Liberia because it was difficult to find the man’s travel history in the EMR.
The hospital later backed off the criticism of Epic, though, when it became clear that the patient had withheld important information from clinicians. The incident still raised questions about EMR system design.
Photo: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images
