News: Partnership for Health IT Patient Safety releases copy and paste toolkit

One of the biggest concerns regarding electronic health record implementation has been the proliferation of physicians simply copying and pasting information from the previous days’ record forward. Now, there’s new guidelines on effective use of this tool from the Partnership for Health IT Patient Safety, a collaborative organized by the ECRI Institute, which released a  Health IT Safe Practices: Toolkit for the Safe Use of Copy and Paste, in February.

The comprehensive toolkit, created by the organization’s 40-person copy-and-paste workgroup, uses case studies and provides recommendations on how to navigate the copy/paste functionality in an electronic health record system, a challenge CDI specialists are all too familiar with. Following review and discussion, the group identified four “Safe Practice Recommendations” for the use of copy and paste:

1. Provide a mechanism to make copy-and-paste material easily identifiable.
2. Ensure that the provenance of copy-and-paste material is readily available.
3. Ensure adequate staff training and education regarding the appropriate and safe use of copy and paste.
4. Ensure that copy-and-paste practices are regularly monitored, measured, and assessed.

The workgroup included healthcare providers, health information technology (IT) developers, academic researchers, patient safety organizations, liability insurers, and professional societies. This is the group’s first release in what their website says will be a series of recommendations designed to improve health IT safety.