Implementation of the Electronic Medical Record in a hospital or office setting carries inherent risk.  Like all medical technology, there is danger as well as benefit to the patient.  Unfortunately, this aspect of EMR implementation has been woefully neglected.  Our approach has been to consider the EMR no more risky than the doctor’s pen it replaces.  This could not be farther from the truth.  I refer the interested reader to the following blog post as an introduction to this fact:

How Medical Tech Gave a Patient a Massive Overdose

Next time, we’ll explore this aspect of EMR implementation further.