Are You Getting The Real Electronic Medical Record?

“For decades lawyers and courts accepted medical records produced as the source of truth. That trust has been broken as the ability to cover up a broad range of mistakes and information gaps is far too easy.” – Andrew Garrett CEO Garrett Discovery Inc

Over the past decade Garrett Discovery experts have examined medical record systems and found that in their plaintiff cases more than 90% of defendants have either altered medical records or withheld sections of the record. The Chicago – Cook County court system took special interest in Garrett Discovery’s reports highlighting alterations and withheld records. A Judge attended a medical record inspection at one of the nation’s largest hospitals and saw firsthand that critical parts of the medical record were withheld and potentially altered.

Most medical record systems have robust auditing systems and although lawyers have asked for the audit trails, they are often duped with access logs that contain no transaction level auditing entries that is readily available in all certified electronic medical record systems.

By examining the Medical Record and performing an inspection of the record within the Electronic Medical Record you can see mistakes, information gaps, typos, strike outs, redlines, workflow analysis that answers whether or not the practitioner relied on old or incorrect records, interoperability data, altered entries and a hundreds of other points.

Any litigator that doesn’t trust the record must perform a record inspection. Most EMR vendors have prevented the ability to print or export alterations to medical records. It is these discrepancies between what is in the EMR vs what is the Final Medical Record that can often bring a case to resolution quickly for fear of corporate malfeasance. Courts are becoming wiser to the flaws in EMR’s and the games played within electronic medical records discovery.