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McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics


Blog Articles


The Benefits of Increased Online Access


Wednesday, February 10th, 2016

Time To Implement IOM Health IT Recommendations For Improving Diagnosis


Wednesday, January 27th, 2016

How Much Do Health IT Professionals Earn?


Wednesday, January 6th, 2016

How Health IT is Advancing Collaborative Care


Wednesday, December 9th, 2015

Digital Technology Takes on Mindfulness


Wednesday, November 25th, 2015

SBMI Heads to San Francisco for #AMIA2015


Wednesday, November 11th, 2015

Most Popular EHR: Who is Number One?


Wednesday, November 4th, 2015

The Future (and Present) of 3D Printing


Thursday, October 29th, 2015

Time To Implement IOM Health IT Recommendations For Improving Diagnosis


Wednesday, October 21st, 2015
written by Dean Sittig and Hardeep Singh

  • StudentOne 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.