Dive Brief:
- Few hospitals (24%) have policies in place regulating the copying and pasting of health information into EMRs, according to a report from HHS's Office of the Inspector General.
- The report, which was based on a voluntary survey of 864 hospitals that had gotten EMR incentive payments as of March 2012, found that improper use of EMR copy-and-paste capabilities could lead to fraudulent billing and flawed patient information being entered into the records.
- According to the OIG, 61% of such policies put the responsibility for ensuring accurate copying on the EMR user.
Dive Insight:
While cutting and pasting data from one template or field to another is seldom an attempt to defraud anyone -- it's just a workaround to save time -- it's still a problem hospitals need to address systematically. Simply pushing off responsibility onto the end users doesn't address the issue adequately, though. Ultimately, if clinicians are feeling so squeezed for time that they're creating inaccuracies by cutting and pasting, maybe the EMR user interface is the problem. In that case, cutting and pasting will persist until the whole EMR works better for those who use it.