Electronic Health Records

Usability and unintended safety issues

Electronic Health Records: Usability and Unintended Safety Issues

Across the country, virtually all doctor’s offices and hospitals use electronic health records, or EHRs, to capture patient information. But EHR usability – their layout, design, customizations, and how they fit into different workflows—can impact patient safety.

In this video, you'll see one example of a health IT-facilitated error – how a computer auto-refresh results in a doctor pulling up the wrong record without even realizing it, and how it impacts the care a patient receives.

This is a fixable problem, but we need more research on how, when, and why these errors occur.

Learn more about how we can make health IT safer: http://www.pewtrusts.org/HealthIT.