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