Electronic Health Records Bring Risks As Well As Benefits

Bloomberg: Digital Health Records' Risks Emerge As Deaths Blamed On Systems
When Scot Silverstein's 84-year-old mother, Betty, starting mixing up her words, he worried she was having a stroke. So he rushed her to Abington Memorial Hospital in Pennsylvania…Electronic health records are supposed to improve medical care by providing physicians quick and easy access to a patient's history, prescriptions, lab results and other vital data. While the new computerized systems have decreased some kinds of errors, such as those caused by doctors' illegible prescriptions, the shift away from paper has also created new problems, with sometimes dire consequences (Robertson, 6/25).