The rollout of Cerner’s electronic health record in Veterans Affairs hospitals has been a high-profile struggle: outages, training troubles, and now, an alarming report showing it directly harmed scores of patients.
And while the system’s stumbles are noteworthy, they’re far from rare. Across the country, health systems large and small are engaged in the work of tweaking and transitioning between electronic health records. Health informatics and patient safety experts acknowledge that they regularly break, in ways big and small — and largely, those problems and the harms they cause go unrecorded.
