Electronic Medical Records
Today we discussed how electronic medical records (EMRs) can attribute to an unsafe healthcare system. I was surprised to learn that EMRs originally were implemented for patient safety reasons because throughout the progression of my medical school training, it became very clear to me that EMRs served more of a billing purpose than a safety purpose. As medical students, all of our notes have disclaimers at the top that they cannot be used for billing purposes. Residents receive talks one how to write note with the correct words so that billing can be done accurately. These things reinforce that EMRs are for billing and not for efficiency nor patient safety.
Before beginning residency, we are required to do online training on how to use EMR system at our hospitals. However, we do not receive any information about safety checks or even the information on failures of these… Continue reading
Failure to Rescue
I start my residency in Internal Medicine in less than one month. I am very excited to finally be a doctor, and I am also pretty nervous. While I realize there will be the residents and attendings above me throughout my intern year, I am afraid that my inexperience as a physician will predispose me to something we learned about today: premature closure. Premature closure occurs when we make a diagnosis too quickly and fail to zoom out to see the entire picture of the patient’s signs and symptoms. We let momentum get in our way of reassessing our conclusions and assumptions, and this can negatively impact our patients. However, I commit myself to the ways that can mitigate early closure: I hope that I will always ask myself whether everything is explained by my initial diagnosis and whether there is anything missing, I hope that these two simple questions… Continue reading