Complaints About Electronic Health Records Increasing

As electronic health records reach a critical mass in the healthcare field, the litany of problems with them could be "hazardous to your mental health," the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Bill Toland reports. The symptoms of issues with electronc health records (EHRs) include "pharmacy errors, hard-to-find clinical alerts, 'farcical' training, and potentially life-threatening design flaws," Toland further reports. EHR critic Dean Kross, a cardiologist in private practice at the Allegheny Health Network, told Toland that EHR vendors have not been held accountable for the devices they are manufacturing.

The main safety issue with EHRs may be ensuring patient safety and privacy during their implementation. They are still thought to be a better practice than paper records. For example, faxes of patients are still commonly used in Canada, and an Alberta man reports that he has been receiving private health records on his office fax machine for the last six years, Canada's Global News reports. But EHRs are only as secure as technology can make them. Community Health Systems Inc., one of  the largest hospital groups in the United States, disclosed this week that Chinese hackers stole social security numbers and other personal data of 4.5 million patients, Reuters reports. The security breach did not include patient information.