EHR Online Safety System LaunchedEHR Online Safety System Launched

Health IT Boosts Patient Care, Safety

A new online safety reporting system to help doctors and other clinicians tackle issues related to the implementation of electronic health record (EHRs) has been launched by the iHealth Alliance, a not-for-profit organization, in collaboration with federal agencies, the PDR Network and other healthcare stakeholders.

At a press conference Monday in Washington D.C. to launch the website, speakers indicated that they clearly expect difficult issues to arise as healthcare delivery organizations move away from a paper-based system and accelerate their adoption of EHRs. But they noted that information collected from the site should help healthcare providers with software problems, inadequate user training, security, and data-related issues.

David Blumenthal, national coordinator for Health Information Technology, told the audience that as healthcare delivery organizations introduce EHRs, everything should be done to make certain that the implementation of the technology is easy and safe. He said the new voluntary reporting system will be important to enhancing patient safety.

“Improving safety begins with an understanding of where the threats to safety are occurring, and that means having better information. This is one way of getting that information in a prompt and actionable form,” Blumenthal said.

With that in mind, the website, EHRevent.org, uses a standard online format that will collect information from physicians and other healthcare providers who use EHRs. The information will create reports that medical societies, professional liability carriers and government agencies, such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), will use to help educate providers on the potential challenges that EHR systems may bring.

Nancy Dickey, iHealth Alliance chair and former president of the American Medical Association, described the establishment of the website as “an extraordinarily timely and important thing.” She also said the reporting system is being launched amid a tremendous push toward improving the adoption of electronic health records and that there is an unprecedented number of healthcare organizations and professionals that have a goal of providing safe care.

Supporters of the site include the FDA, which will use data collected by the site to help evaluate any safety issues that may surface during the widespread adoption of EHR technology.

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Jeffrey Shuren, director of the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said in a statement: "We look forward to working with the iHealth Alliance to encourage physicians and EHR vendors to report information on their experiences with electronic health records to EHRevent and other appropriate reporting systems."

The reporting of adverse drug events via EHRs will be monitored by iHealth Alliance, with PDR Network providing network operations. The information will be collected using online forms that include the common format developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and the data will be kept confidential through PDR Secure, a patient safety organization that will allow only participating organizations to access the reports.

"Patient Safety Organizations (PSOs) facilitate a shared-learning approach that supports effective interventions to reduce risk of harm to patients and improve quality, " William Munier, director for the Center for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety at AHRQ, said in a statement. “We are collaborating in efforts to facilitate reporting to PSOs those adverse events that are related to EHRs and other health information technology, in order to facilitate the development of safer health information technology solutions."

The website is also supported by EHR vendors, as well as Regional Extension Centers (RECs), which are federally designated groups that assist physicians with EHR selection and adoption. Participating EHR vendors and RECs will help educate physicians on the importance of EHR event reporting and will receive reports as EHRevent partners.

The website is also supported by professional liability carriers, such as The Doctors Company and COPIC Insurance Company.

“Our experience indicates that EHRs have the capacity either to induce or to reduce medical errors in very unique ways, and we have seen data that indicates that EHR adoption may reduce physician liability,” Alan Lembitz, vice president of Patient Safety and Risk Management for COPIC Insurance Company, said in a statement. “It will be increasingly important to understand best practices to improve patient safety for EHRs and for their users, and EHRevent will help both."