"What you cannot anticipate, you cannot dread." - The Fire Rose
I've realized that these past posts, when integrated for an upcoming investigation, tell a story that is probably not uncommon in hospitals today. They form a sort of Diary of EHR-Initiated Tragedy.
I fear that these problems will become far more commonplace under the government "incentives" and penalties for "non-meaningful" users of "certified" health IT.
(Definitions: certified = 'the IT has the features we mandate to gather the data we want, not that the features have to work well, or that the IT is safe'; incentives = 'take our meager dollars and use this IT the way we mandate, or we will punish you by cutting your Medicare reimbursement, even though your quality of care might be equal to or better than those using IT.')
Here are the posts, in chronological sequence as they were written:
1. "On EHR Warnings", http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2011/07/on-ehr-warnings-sure-experts-think-you.html
2. "The Issues at This Site, Started in 1999, Are Not Academic or Theoretical. My Own Mother Was Maimed by a Health IT-Related Problem Last Year", http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/faculty/ssilverstein/cases/?loc=cases&sloc=bcs
3. "Saving My Mother From Being Maimed Twice. MAUDE Adverse Event Report - Life Threatening; Hospitalization Required", http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfmaude/detail.cfm?mdrfoi__id=1729552
4. "Saving My Mother Again. EMR Problems? No, They're Merely Anecdotal; the Truth Must Be That I Attract Bad Electrons and Stale Bits", http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2011/01/ehr-problems-no-theyre-merely.html
5. "Saving My Mother yet Again. EHR Legible Gibberish - Another Example, the ED EHR Allergy List - And Legal Threats for Exposing Problems", http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2011/03/ehr-legible-gibberish-another-example.html
6. "My mother passed away", http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2011/06/my-mother-passed-away.html
7. Aftermath (part 1, more surely to come) - "There Are Still Some Medical Watchdog Organizations That Call a Spade a Spade", http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2011/10/there-are-still-some-medical-watchdog.html
8. [added 11/14/2011] "EMR Defects That Injure and Kill, and Litigation: A Hospital Is Paying a Huge Hourly Rate for This?", http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2011/11/emr-defects-that-injure-and-kill-and.html
This is a cautionary tale regarding one of the biggest non-informed consent-grounded medical experiments in history.
-- SS