The reality of electronic medical records has yet to live up to the promise. suedhang/Getty Images/Cultura RF hide caption
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suedhang/Getty Images/Cultura RF
suedhang/Getty Images/Cultura RF
A decade ago, the U.S. government claimed that ditching paper medical charts for electronic records would make health care better, safer and cheaper.
Ten years and $36 billion later, the digital revolution has gone awry, an investigation by Kaiser Health News and Fortune magazine has found.
Veteran reporters Fred Schulte of KHN and Erika Fry of Fortune spent months digging into what has happened as a result. (You can read the cover story here.)
Here are five takeaways from the investigation.
Patient harm: Electronic health records have created a host of risks to patient safety. Alarming reports of deaths, serious injuries and near misses — thousands of them — tied to software glitches, user errors or other system flaws have piled up for years in government and private repositories. Yet no central database exists to compile and study these incidents to improve safety.
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