Electronic health records were supposed to do a lot: make medicine safer, bring higher-quality care, empower patients, and yes, even save money. Boosters heralded an age when researchers could harness the big data within to reveal the most effective treatments for disease and sharply reduce medical errors. Patients, in turn, would have truly portable health records, being able to share their medical histories in a flash with doctors and hospitals anywhere in the country—essential when life-and-death decisions are being made in the ER.

But 10 years after President Barack Obama signed a law to accelerate the digitization of medical records—with the federal government, so far, sinking $36 billion into the effort—America has little to show for its investment.

…The U.S. government bankrolled the adoption of this software—and continues to pay for it. Or we should say: You do.

…Rather than an electronic ecosystem of information, the nation’s thousands of EHRs largely remain a sprawling, disconnected patchwork. Moreover, the effort has handcuffed health providers to technology they mostly can’t stand and has enriched and empowered the $13-billion-a-year industry that sells it.

…Instead of reducing costs, many say EHRs, which were originally optimized for billing rather than for patient care, have instead made it easier to engage in “upcoding” or bill inflation (though some say the systems also make such fraud easier to catch).

More gravely still, a months-long joint investigation by KHN and Fortune has found that instead of streamlining medicine, the government’s EHR initiative has created a host of largely unacknowledged patient safety risks. Our investigation found that alarming reports of patient deaths, serious injuries, and near misses—thousands of them—tied to software glitches, user errors, or other flaws have piled up, largely unseen, in various government-funded and private repositories.

…EHRs promised to put all of a patient’s records in one place, but often that’s the problem. Critical or time-sensitive information routinely gets buried in an endless scroll of data, where in the rush of medical decision-making—and amid the maze of pulldown menus—it can be missed.

…A 2016 study by The Leapfrog Group, a patient-safety watchdog based in Washington, D.C., found that the medication-ordering function of hospital EHRs—a feature required by the government for certification but often configured differently in each system—failed to flag potentially harmful drug orders in 39% of cases in a test simulation. In 13% of those cases, the mistake could have been fatal.

……Martin Makary, a surgical oncologist at Johns Hopkins and the coauthor of a much-cited 2016 study that identified medical errors as the third leading cause of death in America, credits EHRs for some safety improvements—including recent changes that have helped put electronic brakes on the opioid epidemic. But, he says, “we’ve swapped one set of problems for another. We used to struggle with handwriting and missing information. We now struggle with a lack of visual cues to know we’re writing and ordering on the correct patient.”

…Typically, doctors and nurses blame faulty technology in the medical-records systems. The EHR vendors blame human error. And meanwhile, the cases mount.

…Schneider recalls one episode when his colleagues couldn’t understand why chunks of their notes would inexplicably disappear. They figured out the problem weeks later after intense study: Physicians had been inputting squiggly brackets—{}—the use of which, unbeknownst to even vendor representatives, deleted the text between them. (The EHR maker initially blamed the doctors, says Schneider.)

…Compounding the problem are entrenched secrecy policies that continue to keep software failures out of public view. EHR vendors often impose contractual “gag clauses” that discourage buyers from speaking out about safety issues and disastrous software installations—though some customers have taken to the courts to air their grievances. Plaintiffs, moreover, say hospitals often fight to withhold records from injured patients or their families. 

…KHN and Fortune examined more than two dozen medical negligence cases that have alleged that EHRs either contributed to injuries, had been improperly altered, or were withheld from patients to conceal substandard care. In such cases, the suits typically settle prior to trial with strict confidentiality pledges, so it’s often not possible to determine the merits of the allegations. EHR vendors also frequently have contract stipulations, known as “hold harmless clauses,” that protect them from liability if hospitals are later sued for medical errors—even if they relate to an issue with the technology.

…The software in question was an electronic health records system, or EHR, made by eClinicalWorks (eCW), one of the leading sellers of record-keeping software for physicians in America, currently used by 850,000 health professionals in the U.S. It didn’t take long for Foster to assemble a dossier of troubling reports—Better Business Bureau complaints, issues flagged on an eCW user board, and legal cases filed around the country—suggesting the company’s technology didn’t work quite like it said it did.

…Delaney noticed scores of troubling problems with the system, which became the basis for his lawsuit. The patient medication lists weren’t reliable; prescribed drugs would not show up, while discontinued drugs would appear as current, according to the complaint. The EHR would sometimes display one patient’s medication profile accompanied by the physician’s note for a different patient, making it easy to misdiagnose or prescribe a drug to the wrong individual. Prescriptions, some 30,000 of them in 2010, lacked proper start and stop dates, introducing the opportunity for under- or overmedication. The eCW system did not reliably track lab results, concluded Delaney, who tallied 1,884 tests for which they had never gotten outcomes.

…The user interface offered a few ways to order a lab test or diagnostic image, for example, but not all of them seemed to function. The software would detect and warn users of dangerous drug interactions, but unbeknownst to physicians, the alerts stopped if the drug order was customized. 

…Physicians complain about clumsy, unintuitive systems and the number of hours spent clicking, typing, and trying to navigate them—which is more than the hours they spend with patients.

…”In America, we have 11 minutes to see a patient, and, you know, you’re going to be empathetic, make eye contact, enter about 100 pieces of data, and never commit malpractice. It’s not possible!”

…Beyond complicating the physician-patient relationship, EHRs have in some ways made practicing medicine harder, says Hal Baker, a physician and the chief information officer at WellSpan, a Pennsylvania hospital system. “Physicians have to cognitively switch between focusing on the record and focusing on the patient,” he says. He points out how unusual—and potentially dangerous—this is: “Texting while you’re driving is not a good idea. And I have yet to see the CEO who, while running a board meeting, takes minutes, and certainly I’ve never heard of a judge who, during the trial, would also be the court stenographer. But in medicine … we’ve asked the physician to move from writing in pen to [entering a computer] record, and it’s a pretty complicated interface.”

Even if docs may be at the keyboard during visits, they report having to spend hours more outside that time—at lunch, late at night—in order to finish notes and keep up with electronic paperwork (sending referrals, corresponding with patients, resolving coding issues). That’s right. EHRs didn’t take away paperwork; the systems just moved it online. And there’s a lot of it: 44% of the roughly six hours a physician spends on the EHR each day is focused on clerical and administrative tasks, like billing and coding, according to a 2017 Annals of Family Medicine study.

…In preliminary studies, Ratwani has found that doctors have a typical physiological reaction to using an EHR: stress. When he and his team shadow clinicians on the job, they use a range of sensors to monitor the doctors’ heart rate and other vital signs over the course of their shift. The physicians’ heart rates will spike—as high as 160 beats per minute—on two sorts of occasions: when they are interacting with patients and when they’re using the EHR.

“Everything is so cumbersome,” says Karla Dick, a family medicine doctor in Arlington, Texas. “It’s slow compared to a paper chart. You’re having to click and zoom in and zoom out to look for stuff.” With all the zooming in and out, she explains it’s easy to end up in the wrong record. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to cancel an order because I was in the wrong chart.”

…She notes that the average ER doc will make 4,000 mouse clicks over the course of a shift, and that the odds of doing anything 4,000 times without an error is small. “The interfaces are just so confusing and clunky,” she adds. “They invite error … it’s not a negligence issue. This is a poor tool issue.”

…“It’s not that we’re a bunch of Luddites who don’t know how to use technology,” says the Rhode Island ER doctor. “I have an iPhone and a computer and they work the way they’re supposed to work, and then we’re given these incredibly cumbersome and error-prone tools. This is something the government mandated. There really wasn’t the time to let the cream rise to the top; everyone had to jump in and pick something that worked and spend tens of millions of dollars on a system that is slowly killing us.”

…The numbing repetition, the box-ticking, and the endless searching on pulldown menus are all part of what Ratwani calls the “cognitive burden” that’s wearing out today’s physicians and driving increasing numbers into early retirement.

In recent years, “physician burnout” has skyrocketed to the top of the agenda in medicine. A 2018 Merritt Hawkins survey found a staggering 78% of doctors suffered symptoms of burnout, and in January the Harvard School of Public Health and other institutions deemed it a “public health crisis.”

One of the coauthors of the Harvard study, Ashish Jha, pinned much of the blame on “the growth in poorly designed digital health records … that [have] required that physicians spend more and more time on tasks that don’t directly benefit patients.”

…In early 2017, Seema Verma, then the country’s newly appointed CMS administrator, went on a listening tour. She visited doctors around the country, at big urban practices and tiny rural clinics, and from those frontline physicians she consistently heard one thing: They hated their electronic health records. “Physician burnout is real,” she tells KHN and Fortune. The doctors spoke of the difficulty in getting information from other systems and providers, and they complained about the government’s reporting requirements, which they perceived as burdensome and not meaningful.

…The notion that one EHR should talk to another was a key part of the original vision for the HITECH Act, with the government calling for systems to be eventually interoperable.

What the framers of that vision didn’t count on were the business incentives working against it. A free exchange of information means that patients can be treated anywhere. And though they may not admit it, many health providers are loath to lose their patients to a competing doctor’s office or hospital. There’s a term for that lost revenue: “leakage.” And keeping a tight hold on patients’ medical records is one way to prevent it.

…When it comes to patients, though, the real sharing too often stops. Despite federal requirements that providers give patients their medical records in a timely fashion, in their chosen format, and at low cost (the government recommends a flat fee of $6.50 or less), patients struggle mightily to get them. A 2017 study by researchers at Yale found that of America’s 83 top-rated hospitals, only 53% offer forms that provide patients with the option to receive their entire medical record. Fewer than half would share records via email. One hospital charged more than $500 to release them.

…When Seema Verma’s husband was discharged from the hospital after his summer health scare, he was handed a few papers and a CD-ROM containing some medical images—but missing key tests and monitoring data. Says Verma, “We left that hospital and we still don’t have his information today.” That was nearly two years ago.

Death by a Thousand Clicks: Where Electronic Health Records Went Wrong | Fortune

Jeezus Krrrr-eyest.

The United States of Money Grubbing Ineptitude….