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EHR: Health systems should know which patients have died
A research letter in JAMA Internal Medicine highlights a troubling pattern in hospital record-keeping: Electronic health records don’t always reflect patients’ death. In an analysis of 41 clinics at one academic health system covering roughly 11,700 patients, almost 700 were marked deceased in a California state public health file but listed as alive in their electronic medical records — meaning that about 19 percent of deceased patients overall were deemed alive in their records. What’s more, dead patients received more than 200 telephone calls and 300 portal messages after their death, all unrelated to their death, authors wrote.
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