Turning medical residents away from copy-and-paste culture facilitated by EMR

From MedCityNews:

Cleveland VA is trying to cut out the burgeoning subculture of “copy-and-paste”: A phenomenon made possible by electronic medical records in which physicians copy old information about a patient and paste it into a new section of the chart.

The practice is seen by medical residents as a time-saver but the attendings consider it an “egregious problem” because the practice has the potential to perpetuate mistakes. For example, someone might copy and paste information from a patient’s medical history without verifying that the information is correct. Any errors that might exist will be repeated.

EMR can’t just disable the copy-and-paste function, since such a move would impact other programs.

References:

Turning medical residents away from copy-and-paste culture. MedCityNews.

Medical Malpractice Liability in the Age of Electronic Health Records - NEJM, 2010 http://goo.gl/cGZG9
"The iPatient is getting wonderful care across America. The real patient wonders, "Where is everybody?" NYTimes, 2011.