Health information technology is not immune to human error

Doctors can make mistakes when calculating the proper dosage of a medication. They can fail to read a patient’s chart before prescribing a certain type of medication. In other cases, a patient’s chart may be missing information vital for a doctor to designate the appropriate course of treatment. The examples listed above only scratch the surface of the types of doctor errors that can lead to serious, and preventable, injuries to patients. Over the past few years the health care industry has begun introducing health information technology (health IT) and electronic health records (EHRs) to help reduce the potential for human errors. While the aim of health IT is to reduce doctor errors it still relies on humans to use and maintain it and as we all …