Copying and Pasting in the EMR

Bill Hersh at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, OR has an interesting article on the practice of copying and pasting information from one note to the next in an EMR. This practice can be a big time saver - but also carries a huge risk of propagating errors that can potentially affect patient safety.

From the article: "One concern that has been raised about the EHRs is the ease with which patient information can be "copied and pasted." When this is done for information that is different or has changed, it has the potential to introduce and/or propagate errors in the medical record. Indeed, this has been identified as a concern of EHR users and has been shown to occur in 10%–20% of all charts."

You can read the full article at: http://www.webmm.ahrq.gov/case.aspx?caseID=157

Welcome!

Welcome. This blog has been established as a forum for residents to raise questions, post comments and share tips & tricks they have learned in using CIS. The blog was developed with the idea that while resident physicians spend countless hours working with CIS (and thus develop an enormous working knowledge of the system) there is no current way for residents to share their knowledge with each other or other clinicians at the institution. This on-line forum will hopefully serve as a means of fostering communication and enabling the wisdom of crowds to work in our favor.

For the time being, the blog will be open to Baystate residents only. In the future it will likely be open to the entire web.