My friend FJ, who blogs at TechSocioTech, sent me a link to a news article from a Dutch newspaper, covering the results of a survey of 1800 patients by the Dutch Patient Consumer Federation. Since my Dutch is poor, he kindly provided me with a quick translation (probably not intended for blog publication, but it’s a lot cleaner than Google translate!). It speaks for itself:
AMSTERDAM – Medical records are often full of errors and incomplete. Almost 60 percent of the people who responded to a campaign to notify the Dutch Patient Consumer Federation (NPCF) had to correct or supply missing information to caregivers because insufficient information was available.
Moreover, participants regularly noted egregious mistakes.Therefore a large majority has a negative attitude towards digital medical records. The case files of one in five patients were even lost at one point or another, a spokesperson said.
Most people who are already worried about the medical data are therefore also skeptical about the safety of the SPD. While they worried, two thirds believe that digital exchange of patient data is helpful in case of emergency, medication, and clinical insights. 1800 people took part in the campaign of NPCF. (ANP)
I’ve been trying to find an English copy of the press release, but no success so far. Do we have an entire country of ePatient Daves? This reinforces a simple observation about EHRs in general – they probably won’t be widely accepted until the data quality reaches a sufficiently high level, and that just hasn’t happened yet. Right now consumers expect that EHR data is both more widely available than it actually is, and over higher quality. What happens when they find out?