Giving a patient medications in the ER, having them pop positive on a test, and then withholding further medications because…
Morning Headlines 6/20/13
Atul Gawande, Renowned Surgeon And Writer, Launches Innovation Lab
Surgeon Atul Gawande, MD, once named by Time magazine as one of the world’s most influential thinkers and author of The Checklist Manifesto, launches the Adriane Labs health innovation center. It will conduct research focusing on childbirth and death.
Health Law Won’t Bring Prices Down For Patients
At a Capitol Hill hearing Tuesday, Time magazine journalist Steven Brill told Senate Finance Committee members that President Obama’s healthcare law will do little to lower prices for consumers. Brill covered health care costs in a heavily circulated recent Time article titled, "Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us."
Healtheway Announces Founding Members for Groundbreaking Public/Private Health IT Exchange
Healtheway, the nonprofit organization that supports the eHealth Exchange, today announced its nine founding organizations, of which Epic is the only EHR vendor and Kaiser Permanente is the only health system.
Affinity nurses seek delay on electronic records
Unionized nurses at Massillon, OH-based Affinity Medical Center call for a delay in its Cerner implementation scheduled for this weekend, citing insufficient training and patient safety concerns. The nurse’s union is using the issue to demand contract negotiations.
#affinity nurses
The deployment of EHR and CPOE systems is becoming more controversial. The nurses appear to have more backbone than the doctors in shouting out that there is “trouble in River City” with a capital “H” and capital “I” and a Capital “T”.
Certainly, the AMA , considering its new chief, will laugh at doctors who complain about the disruption in hospital care processes caused by HIT as you reported in that 2 week outage.
I love your Blog, Mr. H
Agree with Jenny – nurses are last vestige of genuine patient advocacy. “Whistleblowing”, even if courageous, is punished. Nurses in Marin simply asking for a sane pause in dangerous situation were publicly discounted.
Recent data show almost 50% of nurses subject to verbal (or worse) abuse for voicing concerns at patient level. The HIT industry is rife with marketing platitudes about patient safety while vendors fearful of oversight pledge to get some ethics, but who in reality is actually fighting for patients?
Change is hard and EHR transition painful but to dismiss the people with our lives in their hands is beyond callous. I’ve not heard nurses (except a few on HIStalk) clamor to ditch EHRs or go back to paper, just “first, do no harm”. And BTW, design systems that work for us.
Last I read, MDs via AMA asked for EHR lemon law as primary recommendation – and dispensation from use – not offering actionable, positive plan for improvement.
If MDs and RNs ever broke camp and united with rather than bickering, they’d be a force to reckon with against big business. But clearly value is seen in dividing and conquering.
Nurses and docs uniting, good one
Ann – Very interesting POV.
One note – HIT vendors did not create the working dynamic between nurses and doctors, nor do they try and divide doctors and nurses. But they do follow the money – and historically, the most direct path is to heatlhcare executives and doctors.
In my experience, nurses have been more open-minded and flexible in implementing EHR solutions – that isn’t to say they don’t push back, but in general they been quicker to recognize the potentials benefits of automation in a task-intensive environment.