All health care facilities are, or soon will be, required to maintain a patient’s medical records in electronic form. Almost all hospitals currently use EMR systems. Several U.S. companies are marketing and installing these systems. Using them has helped avoid some problems of hand-written charts, but also has created entirely new problems.
In modern hospitals the health care providers rely more and more on machines. A patient’s well-being is maintained through monitoring devices (picture the screen above the patient’s bed showing a pulse), breathing-assistance machines, and drug dispensing methods. The failure of any of these devices, or a malfunction, can adversely affect the patient’s well-being or even cause a death.
A recent trend in Washington is changing the face of hospital medical care. Hospitals are merging, acquiring other hospitals, or otherwise entering into arrangements for some kind of operating control or joint practice. Examples include Swedish Medical Center, which has taken over the former Stevens Hospital (now called Swedish Edmonds). Swedish, in turn, is now in a partnership arrangement with the Providence hospital group in Washington, Oregon, and Alaska.
The issue of transparency in hospitals is not a new one, particularly when errors occur. On the one hand, hospitals prefer not to disclose information that might open them up to liability due to an error that resulted in injury to a patient. Hospitals also argue that allowing it to have a degree of privacy makes patients safer, because they can have internal discussions about what went wrong and fix the problem so that it hopefully will not happen again.
