Across the country, virtually every medical office and hospital uses electronic medical records (EMRs) to collect patient information. But the usability of EMRs—how they look, feel, are customized, and integrate into workflows—can impact patient safety.

In this video, you'll see an example of IT-facilitated error in healthcare: how a computer's automatic refresh causes a doctor to view the wrong record without even realizing it, and how this affects the care a patient receives.

This is a fixable problem, but we need to do more research into how, when, and why these errors occur.

To learn more about how we can make health IT safer: http://www.pewtrusts.org/HealthIT

*Full Transcript*
Remember when going to the doctor looked like this?

Now it looks more like this.

Across the country, more and more medical practices are using electronic health records, or EHRs.

As digital records have become more common, unforeseen issues with design, workflow, training, and how clinicians use them have contributed to patient harm.

To learn more, we spoke with Dr. Raj Ratwani of Medstar Health, a leading researcher on EHR usability and security.

EHRs should make it easier and safer for clinicians to provide patient care.

Suboptimal usability of EHRs can lead to errors such as selecting the wrong patient, ordering the wrong medication, or missing critical lab results.

Dr. Terry Fairbanks of Medstar Health, who studies human factors in health care, explained how a computer's automatic refresh error can cause a problem without the doctor realizing it.

Consider two patients, Martha Jones and Daniel Rodriguez, who arrive at the emergency room on the same day with similar problems. They both need chest x-rays.

When the doctor goes to see Martha Jones, he goes into the patient's electronic medical record to review the X-ray.

And the doctor actually takes out Daniel Rodriguez's x-ray thinking it's Martha's.

And that x-ray looks normal, so the doctor sends Martha home.

This all happened in a split second, so let's slow down and see what actually happened.

Between the first and second click, the database updates and refreshes automatically.

So, by the time the doctor completes the second click, the X-ray icon his cursor is now over belongs to Daniel Rodriguez.

Daniel's x-ray looks good.

On the other hand, here is the actual X-ray of Martha Jones. You can see that there is a large white area here, which represents pneumonia, which requires antibiotics. Without antibiotics, Martha's condition could get worse very quickly.

This is one example of an error facilitated by health information technology, and there are many others.

This is a fixable problem, but there is currently not enough research into how and why these errors occur.

All patients deserve the best possible care.

We need better data now on how, when, and why these challenges arise, so we can all better protect our patients.

Please feel free to connect and share this video with your friends and family if you find it useful.