I Wonder How Accurate All That Data In The #myHealthRecord Is And Will Be in Future?

This appeared a few days ago.

Check Your Medical Records For Dangerous Errors

By Judith Graham November 21, 2018

When Liz Tidyman’s elderly parents moved across the country to be closer to their children and grandchildren years ago, they carried their medical records with them in a couple of brown cardboard folders tied with string.

Two days after their arrival, Tidyman’s father fell, which hadn’t happened before, and went to a hospital for an evaluation.

In the waiting room, Tidyman opened the folder. “Very soon I saw that there were pages and pages of notes that referred to a different person with the same name — a person whose medical conditions were much more complicated and numerous than my father’s,” she said.

Tidyman pulled out sheets with mistaken information and made a mental note to always check records in the future. “That was a wake-up call,” she said.

Older adults have cause to be careful about what’s in their medical records. Although definitive data aren’t available, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology estimates that nearly 1 in 10 people who access records online end up requesting that they be corrected for a variety of reasons.

In the worst-case scenario, an incorrect diagnosis, scan or lab result may have been inserted into a record, raising the possibility of inappropriate medical evaluation or treatment. This, too, is something that Tidyman’s father encountered soon after moving from Massachusetts to Washington. (Her parents have since passed away.)

When both his new primary care physician and cardiologist asked about kidney cancer — a condition he didn’t have — Tidyman reviewed materials from her father’s emergency room visit. There, she saw that “renal cell carcinoma” (kidney cancer) was listed instead of “basal cell carcinoma” (skin cancer) — an illness her father had mentioned while describing his medical history.

“It was a transcription error; something we clearly had to fix,” Tidyman said.

Omissions from medical records — allergies that aren’t noted, lab results that aren’t recorded, medications that aren’t listed — can be equally devastating.

Susan Sheridan discovered this nearly 20 years ago after her husband, Pat, had surgery to remove a mass in his neck. A hospital pathology report identified synovial cell sarcoma, a type of cancer, but somehow the report didn’t reach his neurosurgeon. Instead, the surgeon reassured the couple that the tumor was benign.

Six months later, when Pat returned to the hospital in distress, this error of omission was discovered. By then, Pat’s untreated cancer had metastasized to his spinal canal. He died 2½ years later.

“I tell people, ‘Collect all your medical records, no matter what’ so you can ask all kinds of questions and be on the alert for errors,” said Sheridan, director of patient engagement with the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine.

Lots more here:

https://khn.org/news/check-your-medical-records-for-dangerous-errors/

As far as I am concerned an error rate even one tenth what is mentioned in the US is very, very scary.

You have to wonder just what audits have been conducted given the repeated reports from Pulse+IT and others of errors in data and patient record association.

It should not be too hard to take a thousand records and check at random that each of the documents in a record actually belonged there etc.

I await a comment or two from some insiders.

David.