By Healthcare Facilities Today

After analyzing more than 300 event reports related to EHR software default values, more than 3 percent were found to result in unsafe conditions or prolonged hospitalization for patients, according to a new report by the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority. 

 According to an article on the Healthcare IT News website, the report analyzed 324 EHR default values – which are the preset medication, dose and delivery – that led to events, with the aim of giving state healthcare facilities valuable data to avoid EHR events such as wrong-time and wrong-dose errors in the future. 

 "Default values are often used to add standardization and efficiency to hospital information systems," said Erin Sparnon, patient safety analyst for the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority, in a news release. "For example, a healthy patient using a pain medication after surgery would receive a certain medication, dose and delivery of the medication already preset by the healthcare facility within the EHR system for that type of surgery."

 In the first report, a patient's temperature spiked after a default stop time automatically cancelled an antibiotic, according to the article. In the second report, a patient's sodium levels continued to rise because a default note to administer an ordered antidiuretic "per respiratory therapy" caused nurses not to administer the drug because they incorrectly assumed respiratory therapy was doing so.

Read the article.