Study Suggests Electronic Medical Records Improve Adverse-Event Reporting

Digitized medical records and systems have been proposed as a remedy for a lot of problems, from the difficulty of deciphering a doctor’s handwriting to decentralized and inaccessible patient medical information to long ER wait times. (Whether electronic records can live up to all the hype is, of course, not clear.) 

Now a new Pfizer-sponsored study suggests digitized records may improve the reporting of adverse events associated with prescription drugs, the WSJ reports. (The paper also wrote about this project when it was in progress.)

Research suggests the vast majority of harmful drug-related side effects go unreported to the FDA. This small study — covering 26 physicians at two Boston hospitals over a five-month period — set out to see if incorporating reporting into the electronic medical record system could help change that. As the WSJ describes it: “When one of the doctors in the study recorded discontinuing a medicine because a patient experienced an adverse event, the hospital’s electronic patient record system generated an alert. The system asked the doctor whether the side effect was serious and submitted a report to regulators.”

The physicians in the study reported 217 side effects to regulators during the study period, compared to none the year before.

Only about 20% of the flagged side effects were serious, and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital internist who led the study tells the paper the system may need some rejiggering to reduce the number of reports of non-serious issues. A common complaint of physicians who use electronic medical records is that they issue so many automated alerts for things such as drug interactions that doctors end up ignoring many of the messages.