EHR adoption has had unintended consequences, both good and bad, on who does what in hospitals
by John Nelson, MD, MHM
The accumulated wisdom, research data, and opinions regarding the use of electronic health records (EHRs) are vast. A quick Internet search turns up many informative articles on their positive and negative effects. But I haven’t found many that explicitly review the unanticipated effects EHRs have on who does what in the hospital.
For example, when reports such as admission and discharge notes are done via recorded dictation and transcription, the author would typically dictate where copies of the report should be sent (“copy to Dr. Matheny”) and rely on others to ensure it reached its intended destination. In many hospitals, such reports are now typed directly into the EHR, often using speech recognition software, and it is up to the author to click several buttons to ensure that it is routed to the intended recipients. So now a clerical function, sending reports, is handled by providers. This can be a good thing—reduced clerical staffing costs, faster transmission of reports—but often means that there is no documentation within the report itself of whom it was sent to (i.e., no list of “cc’s”). It also means that when the recipient isn’t easy to find, the report author is likely to give up, and the report may never be sent.
Any hospitalist using an EHR could easily list dozens of similar unanticipated effects, both good and bad. The magnitude and risk of these are difficult to quantify.
Altered Referral Patterns, Division of Labor
A hospitalist-specific side effect of EHR adoption is that they tend to cause many other doctors to resist serving as attending physician, instead asking hospitalists to replace them in that role. Even without EHRs, shifting attending responsibility to hospitalists has been a trend at nearly every hospital for years, but it can be accelerated dramatically at the time of a “go live.” So, in addition to the stress of adapting to the new EHR, hospitalists typically face higher than usual patient volumes resulting from increased referrals from other doctors.
If you’re a hospitalist facing an upcoming “go live,” it would be worth talking to other doctors in multiple specialties regarding your capacity to handle additional work. Keep in mind the possibility of higher than typical winter 2014 patient volumes that could result from patients who are newly insured through health exchanges.
Many factors, in addition to EHRs, are moving physicians away from a willingness to serve as attending, including the complexity of managing inpatient vs. observation status, keeping up with ever-changing documentation, pay-for-performance initiatives, the stress of ED call, and so on. As I’ve written before (see my January 2011 column, “Health IT Hurdles,”), I think effective management of hospital systems is becoming as complicated as safely piloting a jumbo jet. It will be increasingly difficult for doctors in any specialty to stay proficient at “piloting” a hospital unless they do it all or most of the time. And, staying proficient at multiple hospitals simultaneously may not be feasible at some point. We’ll see.
When Do Things Get Done?
A friend of mine, Dr. John Maa, is a general surgeon who was instrumental in establishing one of the first general surgery hospitalist practices. He tells a very personal and tragic story of his mother’s death, which, he has come to believe, might have been made more likely because of the unintended effect of an EHR.
She was a healthy 69-year-old who developed new onset atrial fibrillation and went to “one of the most highly regarded academic medical centers on the West Coast,” albeit not a facility where John was practicing. She was admitted with orders for anticoagulation but spent her first night on a stretcher in the ED because no inpatient bed was available. She went to a hospital room the next day, but her late arrival there delayed the planned transesophageal echo and cardioversion by another day.
Tragically, before the cardioversion could be done, she had a very large embolic stroke that led to brain herniation. A short time later, John and his father made the wrenching decision to discontinue mechanical ventilation. She died 112 hours after walking into the hospital.
What John later learned is that the admission orders written while she was in the ED were put into “sign and hold” status in the hospital’s EHR. Her caregivers had not anticipated a significant delay in moving her to an inpatient bed, and for the 18 or so hours she spent boarding in the ED, her admission orders were not acted on, and anticoagulation was delayed many hours. She might have had the same outcome even if anticoagulation had been started promptly, but it would have been much less likely.
John believes that the “sign and hold” status of the admission orders was a major contributor to the treatment delay. It increased the risk that the ED caregivers never acted on those orders, and may not have even seen them, since the EHR essentially holds them for presentation to the receiving inpatient unit.
John only recognized this vulnerability three years after his mother’s passing, when he underwent the physician training for the same EHR system. The course teachers agreed that this problem could arise if a patient was boarded in the ED for a prolonged period but felt that the responsibility rested with hospital administrators to minimize overcrowding in the ED. John also raised the issue with hospital leadership, who shared his concern but believed that a software remedy should be the solution. Ultimately, the answer may come from medical hospitalists, who recognize that every day and night, patients across America are at risk for a repeat of the incident John’s family suffered nearly five years ago.
In a very well written and moving essay, John describes his mother’s care.1 Though he doesn’t specifically mention the likely contribution of the “sign and hold” orders, it is one more example of EHR-related confusion that can arise around who does what and when they should do it. Clearly, the same sort of confusion exists in a non-EHR hospital, but it is the EHR-related change in the previous way of doing things that likely increases risk.
It can be very difficult—even impossible—to see all of these issues in advance. Even when acknowledged, the challenges can be difficult to address. But the first step is to recognize a problem, or potential problem, and think carefully about how it should be addressed. Source
