Over the weekend I was listening to a ‘Dr. Radio’ conversation with Dr. Gerald Harmon, MD, past-President of the American Medical Association. Dr Harmon, a family practitioner, was asked how family practice has changed during his long career.
He said the biggest change was how many hours practitioners must spend dealing with administrative functions in the office, particularly ‘electronic health record’ issues, instead of seeing patients. It’s causing many doctors to leave their practices, resulting in a shortage of providers.
‘Electronic health records’ were supposed to make everyone’s life easier when they were mandated as part of Obamacare. Instead it has become a problem not only for physicians, as Dr Harmon explained, but for the health of patients as well.
In a column I wrote for Florida Today in 2019, I described what had been revealed in (of all places) a law review article about Electronic Health Records. Dr. Harmon’s comments reminded me of that article. Here’s a summary of my comments in that column.
The article, in an edition of the DePaul University College of Law Review, exposes how health care related decisions made by the Clinton and Obama administrations have significantly compromised your safety. Yet another example of the inevitable bad consequences of government getting involved in health care.
A provision of the comically named “Affordable Health Care Act” (Obamacare) mandates all health care providers must adopt Electronic Health Records (EHR). That mandate followed a 1997 agreement between EHR developers and the Clinton administration FDA. Like most “progressive” ideas, EHR was based on a theory that doesn’t actually work. The theory was that EHR would enhance the quality of care.
The reality is apparently quite different. Aside from well-publicized incidents of the predictable compromises of patient confidentiality due to hacking, we now know the current EHR systems actually endanger patients. Because of the 1997 Clinton administration agreement, those responsible can use the legal system to cover up those dangers.
The DePaul article explains in detail how the Clinton and Obama administrations abrogated their responsibility to regulate EHR, which made it possible for EHR vendors to use the law to prevent public exposure of dangerous flaws in their systems. A horrific example occurred when EHR software arbitrarily changed a pediatrician’s order, without the doctor’s knowledge, that resulted in a child spending weeks in ICU after being nearly fatally over-medicated.
The pediatric episode wasn’t a doctor trying to cover up his own error by blaming the computer. The author of the DePaul article is a healthcare IT expert who has observed in real time, and documented, EHR software making its own changes to medical records. Like HAL, and Skynet becoming self-aware, EHR is substituting itself for the humans it is supposed to serve.
And it gets worse. Under the system put in place by Obamacare, and the 1997 Clinton agreement, EHR vendors are legally insulated from the consequences of their system errors. If your child dies as a result of an EHR glitch, even if you are able to overcome the nearly insurmountable legal hurdles to discover and document the glitch, you can’t sue the EHR vendor. Nor is there any way the government can sanction the vendor.
So if health care providers are aware of EHR problems, and are legally prohibited from exposing them to protect themselves from lawsuits resulting from those errors, why are they continuing to use EHR? Because they have no choice. Using legislation passed by the Democrat-controlled congress in 2009, the Obama administration threatened to cut off Medicare payments, and impose significant fines, if the providers didn’t do so.
Apparently patient safety wasn’t a consideration in advancing the Democrat agenda. Your child’s dead? Too bad, so sad! Just collateral damage along the road to a progressive brave new world, and — considering that socialist regimes murdered nearly 100 million human beings in the last century — what are a few dead kids from computer generated medical errors?
The DePaul article doesn’t say that either Democratic administration knew about EHR glitches and allowed them to happen anyway, nor am I suggesting that.
I believe the old adage that you shouldn’t attribute to mendacity anything that can be adequately explained by incompetence. If there is one thing you can rely on from the federal government, it’s incompetent management, especially when the managers are ideologues with an agenda.
You can read the article yourself in the DePaul Law Review, Vol. 68, No. 2 (Winter, 2019) at page 273.
It’s not written in verbose legalese, so you don’t need to be a lawyer to understand it.
Ask your own health care provider if they’ve had any problems with EHR. Mine has. I heard what he dictated to my record during an office visit, and it wasn’t what appeared in the printed copy I received (I keep copies of all my records). When I brought it to his attention, he had some choice words to say about EHR – which I can’t repeat in a family publication.
Does anyone believe the emergence of AI is going to improve the situation? What do you suppose will happen if the AI bot disagrees with your doctor? That’s what happened to the child I mentioned above. The EHR software ‘thought’ the physician’s medication order was wrong so it changed it on its own – and the child nearly died from the medication the software ordered.
As I suggested above – what are a few dead kids in the name of progress?
Gary Beatty lives between Florida and Pagosa Springs. He retired after 30 years as a prosecutor for the State of Florida, has a doctorate in law, is Board Certified in Criminal Trial law by the Florida Supreme Court, and is now a law professor.