The patients had the same name, lived in the same city and were born only one day apart.
But the girl in front of Dr. Shamiza Ally was not the one in the photo on her medical record.
It turns out the front office staff had inadvertently checked in the wrong patient, and Ally had filled in the wrong person’s chart. Ally did not catch the error until it was time to schedule a followup visit.
“It could have ended much worse if medication were involved,” said Ally, a pediatrician at Urban Health Plan, a Bronx clinic serving 31,000 patients, many of them from low-income backgrounds.
The photo in the health chart might not seem like a big deal, but it’s part of the Urban Health Plan’s ongoing system of electronic health records, first implemented six years ago.
The changes include everything from electronic prescriptions sent straight to the pharmacy, scanned X-rays, digital referrals and lab results.
President Obama’s plan to direct $20 billion in stimulus money to computerize health records has been lauded as a big step toward modernizing an inefficient and unwieldy health care system.
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