Clinical Software is Designed for Utopia

Flashback to 2003: It's surprising to note how little has changed...

Patient care information systems like CPOE ... can create unintended or "silent" errors, according to a separate study conducted by the same author in the Netherlands and Australia.

"Many information systems simply don't reflect the health care professional's hectic work environment with its all too frequent interruptions from phone calls, pages, colleagues and patients. Instead these are designed for people who work in calm and solitary environments. This design disconnect is the source of both types of silent errors …Some patient care information systems require data entry that is so elaborate that time spent recording patient data is significantly greater than it was with its paper predecessors," the authors wrote. "What is worse, on several occasions during our studies, overly structured data entry led to a loss of cognitive focus by the clinician."

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