Florida Board Member Recommends Statewide Warning on EMR Errors

Here’s an interesting story from Florida:

A Florida Board of Medicine member wants the board to issue a statewide warning about EMRs, following an incident in which an OB-GYN missed an abnormal Pap smear and blamed the EMR. The OB-GYN punished the EMR by replacing it, while the Board of Medicine punished the OB-GYN with a $20,000 fine, a risk management review, and 100 hours of community service. The board member, a dermatologist, said “”I think the Department of Health needs to put out a warning to physicians that they need to look at their programs’ default settings. This year we have seen as many if not more medical records violations from electronic medical records as we saw from hand-written records violations.”

I’m not sure what benefit the Department of Health issuing a warning would do. I know I’ve never personally seen a warning from the health department (outside of the major news ones). One thing is clear to everyone involved with EMR or not. EMR isn’t the secret potion with no issues. Doctors are still accountable for the care.

Meaning of KLAS Results

I’ve had this post in the hopper since HIMSS back in early March. Unfortunately, it got lost in my other 200 or so draft posts that I work from for future posts. We’ll see if people think I should have left the idea in my drafts or not.

During one my meetings with EMR vendors I discussed the value of KLAS and why this EMR vendor was so HIGH on CCHIT (they’re booth had it plastered all over) and why they chose not to have KLAS ratings plastered beside their CCHIT marketing plan. This really smart EMR vendor marketing manager had previously described the marketing value (note that I didn’t say technical or clinical value) of having the CCHIT certification. So, why not KLAS?

This EMR vendor had obviously done their homework and had considered getting the KLAS rating. The reason they didn’t go that direction was he asked an interesting question of KLAS. He wanted to know how many people actually went to KLAS and downloaded the ratings from their website. Obviously, if they had hundreds of thousands of doctors downloading the ratings from their website, then it could be a great marketing tool for the EMR vendor to sell more product.

Turns out only 5000 people actually downloaded the KLAS ratings. When you add in the EMR vendors and other people who don’t purchase an EMR, that’s such a small footprint. I’ll admit that I’ve seen the KLAS name around a lot of places, but I’ve seen it less and less lately. Does anyone care about KLAS anymore? I’m going to Utah later this month. Maybe I should stop in and say Hi. Seems like there’s such an opportunity in the EMR space right now and they might be missing out.