Can use of EHR reduce medical errors ?

Technology is not perfect but got to say that it is the result of human work so it is bound to have some kind of errors.

I understand that these errors are highly unacceptable especially when it to comes to dealing with patients but in the vast majority of computer-human interactions, it is the human who makes the mistake, and it is the programmer of the software and hardware, another human, who may have made the program hard to use or poor in validating consistency of data. As a result, the real problem and a hard one is one of designing human-computer interfaces that minimize the chances for human error. Far too often, this aspect of design is minimized with the results being a higher probability for mistakes than what could be achieved with a better design.

Studies to date of computer errors in clinical care have by and large identified the computer/human interface as the most frequent cause of error: transcription errors, misreading of displays, mis-navigation among screens, ignoring alerts, overriding warnings or alerts, failing to update reference and resource information. It is comforting to know that very few of these have led to harm because most of these are recognized as errors by trained clinicians before harm occurs. There is little data currently to suggest that we are just seeing the “tip of a gigantic iceberg.” Even the harshest critic of UK’s attempt to implement a nationwide EHR has been focused on the business plans, difficulties of implementation, and cost.

Some more about this would be discussed in the upcoming blog on steps necessary for successful nationwide EHR implementation.

Also read more about this on Healthcare IT world.