newsmax | Dallas doctors apparently never saw a nurse's note that an emergency
room patient with fever and pains had recently been in Africa, and he
was released into the community while infected with deadly Ebola.
It remains unclear why, despite the hospital's attempt at an
explanation Friday. Early in the day, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital
said in a statement that a nurse's notes on the infected patient,
Thomas Eric Duncan, were contained in records that a physician wouldn't
see. Friday night, a spokesman for the institution said that wasn't so.
"We would like to clarify a point made in the statement released
earlier," Wendell Watson, a spokesman for the hospital, wrote in an
e-mail. "As a standard part of the nursing process, the patient's travel
history was documented and available to the full care team in the
electronic health record (EHR), including within the physician's
workflow."
There "was no flaw in the EHR in the way the physician and nursing portions interacted related to this event," Watson said.
The changing message came after the hospital faced criticism from
other medical professionals about the actions taken prior to the
patient's release. Ashish Jha, a health policy professor at Harvard
University's School of Public Health in Boston, said no matter what, the
doctor responsible should have double-checked the man's travel history
before he was sent back out into the community.
‘Logic Flaws'
"There are so many flaws in the logic of ‘The EMR system made us to
do it,'" Jha said in a telephone interview Friday, referring to the
hospital's initial statement. "When a patient walks in the ER with a
fever, the standard question is ‘Have you traveled?' I don't understand
why that question wasn't asked by the physician."
Two days after being released, Duncan returned in an ambulance to the
Dallas hospital, was placed in isolation and subsequently confirmed as
having the deadly disease.
Wendell Watson, a spokesman for the hospital, said earlier Friday
that the hospital had wrongly designed its digital record system so not
all of a nurse's notes are visible to doctors. Its not clear from the
clarification sent to media just before midnight what actually happened.
