Dive Brief:
- The way Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital handled the first known case of Ebola virus in the US could potentially lead to legal trouble for the facility, according to attorneys.
- It's already known that when the Ebola patient first came to the hospital, he was diagnosed with a common viral infection and sent home with antibiotic, and was only admitted and isolated days later. What's not clear is why the hospital didn't catch the danger signs, notably the fact that the patient had recently come from West Africa.
- For the hospital to avoid legal problems around this case, one key issue will be whether the medical staff followed the CDC's hospital checklist for Ebola, which demands that facilities treat someone as if they might have an infectious disease, especially if they came from a West African country.
Dive Insight:
Missing an Ebola patient could create a legal "nightmare" for the hospital's in-house lawyers, according to one general counsel from a large health system. To to avoid being put in a similar position, hospitals around the US are going to have to be extraordinarily careful in screening for the disease, attorneys suggest. Even if appropriate screening systems are in place, hospitals will probably want to take an extra step and review the screening process to be sure staff are asking where patients have recently traveled.
Then, of course, there is the question of whether other hospitals will miss Ebola patients due to missteps with their EMR. Even if Texas Health's second statement is true—in which leaders denied that an EMR error caused the facility to miss the diagnosis—there's no reason why EMRs used by other hospitals might lead to that mistake being made. After all, the same EMR used at two hospitals may be set up differently, and the second might lead to an error in Ebola screening while the first gets the job done. In other words, this is a crunch time for health IT managers as well, who are now on the hook to make sure that their systems support appropriate screening for this deadly disease.
Want to read more? You may enjoy this story about the EMR danger no one talks about.