Healthcare Renewal Cited in Pittsburgh Post Gazette on Health IT Issues

Healthcare Renewal was cited in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette today on health IT issues.

Specifically, regarding issues I raised at my May 25, 2011 post "Transplant Team at UPMC Missed Hepatitis Result - Suspicious for Health IT Failure?"

I have several additional amplifying comments.

Doctor, nurse disciplined by UPMC
Failed to detect hepatitis C in kidney donated for transplant
Friday, May 27, 2011
By Jonathan D. Silver and Sean D. Hamill, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A surgeon and a nurse were disciplined by UPMC for their roles in missing a positive hepatitis C test result in a kidney donor earlier this month that might have stopped the transplant, the hospital system said Thursday.

The surgeon was demoted and the nurse suspended, though neither has been identified.

In addition, after a discussion with federal officials, the hospital system voluntarily suspended its live-donor liver program as a precaution, three days after shutting down its live-donor kidney program on May 6, following the transplant error. Both programs remain closed.

But while UPMC has taken action against the two staff members, health care technology experts say UPMC's information technology might have played a role in the incident.

"Checking for all types of hepatitis is so ingrained in the culture of doctors," said Scot Silverstein, a medical informatics expert and adjunct professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia. "If they didn't check for hepatitis C, that means they didn't check for hepatitis A or B either, and that means they didn't check for anything."

"That just isn't credible," said Dr. Silverstein, who explored the possible ways the technology played a role in the kidney transplant error in the blog Health Care Renewal.

"There are two possibilities," he said. "Either you have a dozen or more people on that transplant team who are just stupid, or, more plausibly, when they looked at the record the hepatitis C record was just not there or it was incorrect when they saw it."

The incident first came to light May 6, when UPMC notified the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) as well as the United Network for Organ Sharing, that it had detected an error in a recent kidney transplant.

It was a living kidney transplant between a woman and a man who are a couple, sources have told the Post-Gazette. The woman did not know she was hepatitis C positive, and she was tested, but the test results were somehow missed by people on the transplant team, and the transplant went forward.

... Because of the error, UPMC had decided on its own on May 6 to shut down the living donor kidney program.

Then, on May 9, when UPMC officials were discussing the situation with the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration, they mutually decided to shut down the living donor liver program, too, said Michele Walton, a CMS spokeswoman.

Read the entire article.

I strongly feel there is much more going on here than a careless surgeon and nurse. Closing down these transplant programs for now is a major, major step that actually endangers patients on waiting lists. As per an anonymous comment received in my aforementioned May 25 post (link to full comment):

I surely hope they get this figured out soon as there are MANY lives on the line here. A very good friend of mine is on the list there and has myself as a willing paired donor and another mutual friend of ours as a perfect match donor that has one test to be done and then it is a go. With all of the testing that we both have had to go through - and by the way, myself now a second round as it has been more than a year since the original testing and no paired match has been located as of yet, that these things are known as soon as the tests are ran. I would have to agree that this must be beyond human error.

... This needs to be addressed and corrected like YESTERDAY. We have many out their literally dying on the lists.

I was also cited as follows later in the Post Gazette article:

... Dr. Silverstein and other experts say the current electronic health records systems that highly wired hospitals like UPMC have in place routinely flag test results for everyone connected to a surgery to see.

But those systems have been known to cause the same kinds of errors they were designed to prevent over the old-fashioned paper records. [E.g., as per the FDA internal memo on HIT risk I described at this Aug. 2010 post; see tables 4 and 5 - ed.]

I do think the reliability of existing alerting systems has been over-represented. "Flagging" a test result awaiting someone to note the flag amidst a sea of screens, icons and clutter, and setting off aviation-like stall alarms and other fail-safes that nobody can miss, are two different matters.

For the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on health IT by organizations like this, and the hype proffered about this technology, events such as the post-facto discovery of a tainted transplanted organ should truly be considered "cybernetic 'never' events."

One might also wonder if the informational issues, whatever their source, occurred more than once: that is, if prior transplant recipients who participated in these programs need to be checked for tainted organs.

That the Post-Gazette article was published on the one-year-to-the-day "anniversary" of my own mother being cybernetically turned into a train wreck due to the toxic effects of HIT -- in an ED where I once worked in the paper era where I do not recall EOT mistakes of the kind that nearly killed my mother ever happening -- is ironic.

Finally:

If health IT is indeed implicated in the UPMC error, and if UPMC knew of system unreliabilities that could have caused the clinical errors, both patients and affected clinicians can likely raise charges of criminal negligence on the part of those responsible for these IT systems.

Politics and an overall 'lawlessness' (per Hoffman & Podgurski) in the health IT sector needs to be replaced with the scientific and regulatory methods of medicine, such as intensive pre-marketing evaluations, clinical trials and post marketing surveillance of these systems.

Perhaps some jail time for the cavalier would remind people these are not toys, gaming computers, or slot machines, and that the subjects of health IT systems are human beings, not lab rats.

-- SS

Addendum May 27, 2011:

A reader reminded me of my 2009 post "UPMC as Proving Ground for IT Tests On Children: Pioneers in Health IT, or Pioneers in Ignoring the Past?"

-- SS