Besides Wasting Money, Are Obamacare’s E-records Killing People?

Comment: Though advertised to save money (long debunked [1]), the real purposes of Orwellbamacare’s electronic data-gathering seem to be invading your privacy and making health care as unwieldy and expensive as possible.  But besides driving up cost and driving down productivity, could this healthcare-Gruberizing mandate actually be killing people when doctors miss vital warnings buried in O-clutter?  You be the judge.

“Something similar is happening to doctors, nurses and pharmacists. And when they’re hit with too much information, the result can be a health hazard. The electronic patient records that the federal government has been pushing — in an effort to coordinate health care and reduce mistakes — come with a host of bells and whistles that may be doing the opposite in some cases.”

[...] “Take Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. In 2012, the facility switched to a new electronic health record, said Eric Shelov, the hospital’s associate chief medical information officer. Immediately, he said, practitioners began seeing far more alerts, to the point that doctors were overriding almost all of them. The problem, Shelov said, is that “if you see enough nonsense, you’re going to start ignoring it.””

“That has consequences. In one instance at Children’s, doctors ignored relevant information about how a patient might respond to a drug, Shelov said, because it appeared alongside heaps of superfluous notifications — warnings, for instance, about drugs that posed minimal risk of interfering with each other. Consequently, the patient received medication that induced a potentially lethal reaction.”

Doctors are overloaded with electronic alerts, and that’s bad for patients
By Shefali Luthra June 13 at 11:59 AM

[1] Bonus article: (You’re welcome!)
“Despite the government’s bribe of nearly $27 billion to digitize patient records, nearly 70% of physicians say electronic health record (EHR) systems have not been worth it. It’s a sobering statistic backed by newly released data from marketing and research firm MPI Group and Medical Economics that suggest nearly two-thirds of doctors would not purchase their current EHR system again because of poor functionality and high costs.”

“ “We used to see 32 patients a day with one tech, and now we struggle to see 24 patients a day with four techs. And we provide worse care,” said one survey respondent. “