Pew/AMA/MedStar Report on Improving Electronic Health Record Safety

The Pew Charitable Trusts, American Medical Association (AMA), and MedStar Health National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare recently released a report on “best practices and model test cases to guide rigorous safety assessments of EHRs.”  Ways to Improve Electronic Health Record Safety reports federal EHR certification requirements (see 45 C.F.R. 170) “do not address circumstances in which customized changes are made to an EHR as part of the implementation process or after the system goes live,” and there are no “requirements and guidance on how to test clinician interaction with the EHR for safety issues.”  These challenges “can fail to prevent – or even contribute to – patient harm.”  The report includes a multidisciplinary expert panel’s “recommendations on how to advance usability and safety throughout the EHR software life cycle” and “criteria detailing what constitutes a rigorous safety test case and the creation of sample test case scenarios based on reported EHR safety challenges.”  For more information, see the 8/28/18 Pew Charitable Trusts article Better Testing of Electronic Health Records Needed to Protect Patients and AMA Improving Electronic Health Records page (navigation: AMA > Delivering Care > Digital Health Leadership > Adoption & Scale of Digital Health Solutions in Practice).