Setting National Goals To Bolster Patient Safety With Electronic Health Records

Dipali Pathak | BCM | November 7, 2012

Electronic health records (EHRs) are expected to improve patient safety, but they themselves can present challenges for which health care providers must be prepared. Experts at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and Baylor College of Medicine have proposed a framework to help develop new national patient safety goals unique to electronic health record-enabled clinical settings.

Their report appears in the current issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Proposed framework

"One of the reasons electronic health records were introduced was because we wanted to make health care safer, more efficient and of higher quality," said Dr. Hardeep Singh, assistant professor of medicine and health services research at the Veterans Affairs Health Services Research and Development Center of Excellence and BCM. "However, electronic health records present new hazards that were brought in with the use of technology and were not seen before. In this paper, we propose a framework that addresses three types of intersections between patient safety and electronic health records."