Many of us can appreciate that medical records are, largely, transitioning from handwritten records to electronic medical record. The benefits of an electronic health record (EHR) are multiple. Nevertheless, they may not be the panacea that they’ve been expected to be. Recent studies from Kaiser Health News and The Doctors Company Insurer illustrate the cost of EHR errors.

Kaiser Health News, earlier this year, published an article regarding some of the difficulties of electronic records. These include system design issues, technology failures, and user error. As a practical matter, that meant glitchy systems where each repair led to further errors, critical orders lost, and even prescriptions were affected. In the Kaiser article, these errors piled up into a substantial settlement between the EHR contractor and the provider (in that case, the United States government).

Aside from the obvious risk of injury, what does that mean for you (particularly if you are a medical negligence victim)? One line we hear from providers is “I ordered the [critical imaging study] but the patient simply did not follow up.” This is a version of the nearly ubiquitous “patient’s fault” defense. The truth, it turns out, may be that the order was never transmitted, was never processed by the EHR, or simply disappeared. So, while the patient did absolutely nothing wrong, they are being doubly victimized here. That means that sometimes the error is scarier than the superficial explanation defendants will fall back on.

And, a recent article based on reports from the Doctors Company, one of the leading insurers of doctors in the US, shows that the number of EHR claims is increasing. While the number of claims closed regarding EHRs represented less than 2% of claims closed over the study period, the number of claims tripled from 7 in 2010 to an average of 22.5 in 2017-2018. Notably, in most of the EHR related claims the systems errors were a contributing factor to the claim rather than the primary factor. That said, the Doctors Company acknowledged that near universal adoption of EHR will likely lead to more EHR related claims.

So, some medical errors may be assigned to more than the treating provider. The problems, however, may lie deeper and behind the shroud of the EHR. And the true story may be below the surface of the medical records, and only by crawling through the EHR can we learn why our clients were injured.

Read the Kaiser Health News Article [here](https://khn.org/news/death-by-a-thousand-clicks/).

Read the article about the Doctors Company [here](https://www.businessinsurance.com/article/20190917/NEWS06/912330709/Electronic-related-med-mal-claims-increasing-The-Doctors).