Copying and pasting of examinations within the electronic medical record.

Electronic patient records often include text that has been copied and pasted from other records. A type of copying that involves the highest risk for confusion, medical error, and medico-legal harm is the copying of the clinical examination. We studied this phenomenon using an automated text categorization algorithm to detect copied exams in a set of 167,076 VA records.

Surveying the RHIO landscape. A description of current RHIO models, with a focus on patient identification.

Across the country, new RHIOs are being formed every day. The 21 RHIOs studied by the work group illustrate the variety of purposes, funding, and record linking methods RHIOs may adopt. As this trend continues to evolve and improve, RHIOs may prove to be a valuable stepping stone on the road to a national system in which a patient's medical data will be available anywhere, anytime.

Are electronic medical records trustworthy? Observations on copying, pasting and duplication.

As routine use of on-line progress notes in US Department of Veterans Affairs facilities grew rapidly in the past decade, health information managers and clinicians began to notice that authors sometimes copied text from old notes into new notes. Other sources of duplication were document templates that inserted boilerplate text or patient data into notes. Word-processing and templates aided the transition to electronic notes, but enabled author copying and sometimes led to lengthy, hard-to-read records stuffed with data already available on-line.