Indiana Injury Law Blog

Huffington Post is drawing attention to the underlying risks as hospitals around the country embrace electronic medical record systems.

For years now, health safety groups have advocated a complete shift to electronic medical records. A system like this, it is believed and Indiana medical malpractice lawyers would agree, would substantially reduce the risk of human error contributing to patient fatalities. However, in far too many instances, there have been fatalities or serious medical injuries caused by the use of these systems.

The kinds of errors made, have differed greatly. In one particular instance, staff misread the fine print on a computer screen, and ended up dispensing more than 10 times the patient’s prescribed medication. As a result, the patient suffered a heart attack. In another instance, a patient died after there was a breakdown of the Computerized Provider Order Entry, which is a central function of the system.

There have been other reports of delayed information, misinformation, and delayed treatment linked to the use of electronic medical records, and with serious consequences. For instance, in one hospital, the computer failed to inform the staff that the patient had been shifted from the intensive care unit to a ward. Nurses were not aware of the patient’s presence in the ward, and failed to attend to him, even as he suffered seizures through the night.

Huffington Post’s Investigative Fund accessed data from the Food and Drug Administration, and found at least 237 reports of “adverse events” associated with the use of electronic medical records over the past two years. Most of these glitches resulted in wrong dosages of medications, while other software bugs delivered wrong test results.

What's worse is that these 237 events may be just the tip of the iceberg. Because the systems are so new, it's hard for hospitals to document how many of these errors have occurred. It doesn't help that the FDA lacks the resources necessary to ensure a smooth transition from paper records to electronic ones.

The federal administration is encouraging hospitals to speed up the shift from paper files to electronic records. The Obama administration is investing more than $27 billion in funding to encourage doctors and hospitals to phase in these systems. However, these funds will be available to those hospitals that can speed up the process of installing these systems. Critics believe that the system is being introduced far too quickly at many hospitals, and without sufficient staff training in the proper use of these systems.

As Indiana medical malpractice attorneys, we believe that speed in installing these systems without focusing on staff training, could actually end up causing more problems than they were meant to solve.

I never get used to the joy of helping victims of medical evidence received the justice they deserve. This week, a jury in Elkhart County awarded my clients a verdict of $1.2 million in total in the death of a woman from cancer.

Nicole Manhart had a Pap smear performed in February of 1998 at the South Bend Medical Foundation.. The smear was wrongly interpreted by technicians at the hospital, as normal. In 1999, Manhart began to suffer severe bleeding. She initially attributed the bleeding to the use of birth-control pills. However, when the bleeding continued even after the birth control pills had been changed, she went in for a medical examination. An ultrasound revealed that she had a large tumor. By the time, Manhart had discovered the tumor, it was already in the third stage. By 2000, Manhart was dead.

This week, an Elkhart County Superior Court jury awarded Manhart's husband and her twin sons total damages of $1.2 million. Her husband Grant Manhart was awarded $200,000, while her twin sons were awarded $500,000 each. The trial centered on whether staff at South Bend failed to read the Pap smear results accurately.

However, an independent medical review board confirmed that the smear slide showed the presence of cancerous and abnormal cells.

The Indiana medical malpractice lawyers at Theodoros and Rooth represent injured victims of medical negligence, including surgical errors, misdiagnoses, failure to diagnose and emergency room errors, in medical malpractice litigation.

If hospitals in Indiana and around the country have begun to feel the heat on their high infection rates, you have medical malpractice lawyers to thank for it. According to a government report released last week, there has been progress in this area, but some kinds of infections continued to increase.

According to the report by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, infections like postoperative blood stream infections and urinary tract infections associated with the use of catheters, have risen over the past year. There was an 8% rise in the case of bloodstream infections. These are serious infections that can lead to a condition called sepsis, marked by high fever, shivering and seizures. There's also been an increase of 6% in catheter-related urinary tract infections in hospitals. Postoperative pneumonia rates were down by 4%, and rates of bloodstream infections caused by placing of catheters in central veins, were the same as the year before.

According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, progress in controlling hospital-acquired infection rates has been too slow. The problem has been in getting hospitals, doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals to abandon their rigid approaches to infection control. Studies have shown that simple steps like hand hygiene, sterilization of equipment and use of checklists can prevent hospital-acquired infections. However, in many hospitals in Indiana and around the country, things are still done the way they were a decade ago.

This much is clear - If your hospital invests in sophisticated and aggressive new methods of infection control, you are less likely to have high infection rates in your facility, or come up against Indiana medical malpractice lawyers.