LOS ANGELES – The recent chatter on a popular social networking site dealt with a problem often overlooked in medicine: mistakes in patients’ medical charts.The twist was the patients were doctors irked to discover gaffes in their own records and sloppy note-taking among their fellow physicians.
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Errors can creep into medical charts in various ways. Doctors are often under time pressure and may find themselves taking shortcuts or not fully listening to a patient’s problems. Others rely on their memory to update their patients’ files at the end of the day. Other mistakes can arise from illegible handwriting or coding problems.