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.

Weight lifters turning to human growth hormone - and that's just the tip of the iceberg

From WebMD and the American Journal on Addictions:

In the study of 230 male weight lifters aged 18 to 40:

- 12% reported use of human growth hormone (HGH) or a similar supplement known as insulin-like growth factor-1

- all weight lifters reported use of anabolic steroids

- 56% percent had a current or past dependence on opioids, cocaine, and/or Ecstasy

HGH was prohibitively expensive in the 1990s, but now pills, powders, and injections can be purchased at low cost on the Internet.

Weight lifters who already take steroids add HGH as a "turbo boost". “You can always tell which elite athletes are on HGH because their bones are growing at a faster rate and their faces look distorted.”

References:
Weight Lifters Turning to Human Growth Hormone. WebMD.

Image source: OpenClipart, public domain