EHRs pose greater threat to patients in America, Sermo survey suggests

While it would appear obvious that any EHR downtime or outage would pose a significant threat to patient safety, a new survey suggests that is not the case in all countries.

Sermo, the social network for physicians, polled its international members and found that more than half indicated such an electronic health record malfunction has never jeopardized patient safety.  

That holds true among developed nations with public healthcare systems, including Canada, England, France and Germany, according to Sermo.

But that’s not so in the United States, where a majority of physicians indicated that EHR downtime has created health and safety issues for patients.

There’s a caveat, though: 1,678 of the total 3,086 respondents were in the United States, representing the biggest concentration of respondents.

The United States was not the only country among the 26 Sermo polled where more respondents suggested problematic EHRs create safety issues. Physicians in Denmark, Greece, Hungary, Poland, South Africa answering “yes” to the question outnumbered those saying “no,” though the number of respondents was very low.

Norway, meanwhile, saw an even split with one doctor answering in the affirmative and the other in the negative.

Here are the results:

Has an EMR/EHR outage or malfunction ever jeopardized the health or safety of a patient?

Twitter: SullyHIT
Email the writer: tom.sullivan@himssmedia.com

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