May 2017

By the Numbers
For The Record
Vol. 29 No. 5 P. 34

140
According to Abraham Verghese, MD, MACP, EMRs are a "4,000 click-a-day problem"; it can take 16 clicks to order baby aspirin and this number of clicks to admit a patient for chest pain. "For every hour with patients, doctors are spending two hours on the computer," he told an audience at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement's 28th annual National Forum on Quality Improvement in Healthcare.

25
According to a report in the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections, researchers analyzed 87 apps focusing on sexually transmitted infections and found this number of apps contained one or more pieces of potentially harmful information. Other findings: 13 apps were fully accurate, 46 were mostly accurate, and 28 were partially accurate.

$386.5 Million
The cost of a project to modernize medical record-keeping for California prison inmates, replacing the state's paper-based records with an electronic system that can track the medical and mental health care of nearly 130,000 people, ballooned to this amount, in part because the original estimate of $182 million left out the cost of maintaining the system and replacing worn-out equipment, as well as the cost of mobile devices and extra software, according to The Associated Press.

2,700
Over an 11-month period, an automated trigger tool combed through more than 40,000 records and uncovered nearly this number of instances of patient harm stemming from incidents both inside and outside Adventist Health System, according to a study published in The Joint Commission Journal for Patient Safety. Comparatively, during an 11-month period two years prior, the system's manual method, which reviewed only 440 records, uncovered 132 instances of patient harm.

98 Million
According to DirectTrust's year-end 2016 metrics, there were more than this number of Direct message transactions between Direct addresses in 2016, bringing the total number of transactions to more than 165 million since DirectTrust's 2013 inception. The number of trusted Direct addresses able to share protected health information across the DirectTrust network increased 24% to more than 1.36 million since the end of 2015, and the number of health care organizations served by DirectTrust-accredited health information service providers increased 36% to nearly 71,000, compared with approximately 52,000 at the end of 2015.

5.5
IBM recently broke the industry record for speech recognition, achieving a word error rate of this percentage.

30
Between January and August 2016, at least this percentage of all breaches reported to Health and Human Services' public breach tool can be traced back to business associates and third-party vendors, and 35% of breached records were caused by third-party breaches, according to a report from DataBreaches.net and Protenus.