AS I WRITE this column in November, I hope that the autumn's top healthcare story, Ebola, will be out of the headlines by January. But the emergence of the disease in the United States in 2014 gave many people in the health IT community pause, particularly the initial misdiagno-sis in Texas that was briefly blamed on the organization's electronic health record (EHR). While the incident was later attributed to failures in miscommunication, authors of an article in the journal Diagnosis suggested that the problem may have originated in the design and workflows of the EHR itself, making the situation more vulnerable to misdiagnosis. "These highly-constrained tools are optimized for data capture, but at the expense of sacrificing their utility for appropriate triage and diagnosis, leading users to miss the forest for the trees," they wrote.
展开▼
