For all the benefits brought about by electronic health records, it’s long been known that they have their pitfalls, whether it’s ungainly user experience or agita caused by alert fatigue.
Another major risk for EHRs is the temptation toward “note bloat” caused by caregivers’ easy ability to copy-and-paste data from other parts of the chart. This defeats the purpose of electronic documentation, of course, creating a large and unwieldy record that can be hard to make sense of – potentially putting patient safety at risk.
