An electronic medical record (EMR) system is the backbone of a healthcare provider’s care provision, especially in home health care. Through an EMR, your team can have a complete picture of your patients’ health status which allows for sound decision-making and faster care delivery, among many other things. Thus, it is critical that the EMR remain a credible and trusted source of patient data. However, due to negligence and carelessness during documentation, patient data is compromised. We recognize that awareness is key, so to help you avoid them in the future, we listed down the top 5 common human errors in EMR documentation that you should never commit.
The assigned discipline may sometimes be in a hurry and speed through choosing the right selection in the dropdown menu, resulting in a wrong input that do not accurately reflect the treatment administered to the patient. For instance, choosing the wrong medication, the wrong intervention, or even as simple as choosing the wrong gender, can have dire consequences, in terms of care provision and compliance.
Pre-populating data in EMRs has become very convenient for users. Through templates, you can easily accomplish a form in a few clicks, a task which would otherwise take you minutes to complete. However, there is such a thing as too much reliance on pre-populated data which leads to assigned disciplines failing to correctly capture a patient’s condition. It is then imperative for your EMR to allow you to freely edit, revise, or input in the templates should there be a need to accurately describe the patient’s condition.
A common practice within an EMR is to copy and paste data especially if there is no significant change from the previous templates. Although convenient, you would still need to be careful in taking this shortcut as there might be information that would need to be updated and just plainly copying and pasting would not work.
Tailgating happens when a staff does not log out of a patient’s records and another staff enters the system using the former’s access, either intentionally or unintentionally. This leaves the patient’s data unsecured and unprotected, vulnerable to unofficial access, inputs, or revisions.
This may be the most common human error of all in EMRs — failing to save the latest changes or updates made in a patient’s record. A usual occurrence is when an assigned discipline takes a long time entering the data in the system just to forget to click the save button, leading to wasted time and effort. There are also instances wherein the computer crashes, the internet gets disconnected, or the staff gets called away while updating a note just to go back to their desk and find that all data is gone and they would have to start over.
To avoid these five common human errors, you need a top-shelf EMR. Data Soft Logic, the Intelligent Care Partner of home health, hospice, and therapy agencies, understands your healthcare system struggles. Home Health Centre Ultra, our home health care software solution, is designed with intelligent workflows and compliance — augmenting features that empower you to avoid these common human errors. One of which is our Autosave Feature which automatically saves your notes, forms, or templates while you are working on them, allowing you to recover the data anytime. To know more about this and all the other features in HHC Ultra, schedule a demo with us now.
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