Half of what's put in your patient records is already there.
Making a brave foray into a particularly ugly area of the profession, some researchers from the University of Pennsylvania set out to answer the question: “How much duplicate content is present in electronic medical records, where does it come from, and why is it there?”
The researchers did some serious number crunching, developing a cross-sectional analysis of 104,456,653 routinely generated clinical notes.
They found that a whopping 16,523,851,210 words (that’s a humungous 50.1%) of the total count of 32,991,489,889 words were duplicated from prior documentation. Duplicate content was prevalent in notes written by medicos at all levels of training and practice.
Of the text duplicated, 54.1% came from text written by the same author, whereas 45.9% was duplicated from a different author – so not always a case of some other bod copying your notes.
The analysis was carried out earlier this year. It reviewed all inpatient and outpatient notes written within the University of Pennsylvania Health System between 1 January 2015 and 13 December 2020. Text duplicated from a different author and text duplicated from the same author were both quantified.
Good job we have computers to do that bugger of a task.
“The findings of this cross-sectional study suggest that text duplication is a systemic hazard, requiring systemic interventions to fix, and simple solutions such as banning copy-paste may have unintended consequences, such as worsening information scatter,” the researchers said.
“The note paradigm should be further examined as a major cause of duplication and scatter, and alternative paradigms should be evaluated.”
The Back Page is struggling with that last one a little, but one thing’s clear: lay off the copy-pasta where possible.
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