National critic of healthcare IT says Marin General should heed nurses' advice

A nationally known critic of electronic health records has harshly criticized managers at Marin General Hospital for their response to a plea by nurses to hold off on a new computer system to prevent potentially dangerous errors. "The executives at the hospital should be taking out extra insurance policies because they're setting themselves up for a massive corporate negligence lawsuit," said Dr. Scot Silverstein, an adjunct professor of health care informatics at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Silverstein, who contacted the Independent Journal after reading about the Marin General situation, doesn't dispute the potential of digital records; but he believes implementation has been rushed.