AMIA: Why The “Hold Harmless” Clause In EMR Contracts Is Unethical
Last Friday the board of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) published a position paper in its journal saying that the “hold harmless” clause is unethical. One of the paper’s authors is Dr. Danny Sands, currently President of the Society for Participatory Medicine. I hope to write more about it this week, after attending the AMIA conference in DC, but here’s the basic issue:
— For ages, makers of electronic medical record systems (EMR) have insisted on a “hold harmless” clause in the contracts a system buyer must sign. It says, in essence, that if any harm comes to anyone because of a system problem, the buyer (the hospital) will hold the manufacturer harmless.
— In other words, if anything goes wrong with the system and someone gets hurt, it’s not the manufacturer’s fault. The reasoning has been: “Hey, you doctors are smart. If our system displays a wrong value, you’re supposed to notice it.”
I’m told this policy has been one big impediment to adoption of EMR systems, because it removes all motivation for vendors to fix things that make their product hard to use: If there’s a bug or the system slows someone down, and a patient gets hurt, the hospital gets sued, not the vendor.
If you were a hospital, wouldn’t that make you eager to buy? What would that do to your trust of the vendor? Patients, how do you feel about that? Providers? Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at e-Patients.net*
