Wednesday, November 11th, 2015
Wednesday, November 4th, 2015
Thursday, October 29th, 2015
Wednesday, October 21st, 2015
written by Dean Sittig and Hardeep Singh
- One year ago, we highlighted missed opportunities in diagnosis of a patient who presented with Ebola in Dallas, Texas; a harmful misdiagnosis with substantial public health implications. Acknowledging human errors were also made, we emphasized specific areas of risk within the electronic health record (EHR)-enabled diagnostic process.
On September 22, 2015, the Institute of Medicine (IOM, now called National Academy of Medicine) released its report “Improving Diagnosis in Health Care” and made several recommendations regarding use and/or misuse of EHRs in the diagnostic process. In this post, we speculate on possible scenarios if some of the recommendations, specifically those related to EHRs, were in place before September 2014. We discuss how the process of diagnosing US Ebola Patient Zero at the initial hospital, or for that matter any EHR-enabled hospital emergency department (ED) across the US, might have been different.