Copy and Paste: A Remediable Hazard of Electronic Health Records

Siegler opines that one of the most egregious dangers of electronic charting lies not in a deficiency but in a feature, the copy-and-paste function, which allows an author to copy information from a prior note and paste it into a new note. Although physicians generally fail to perceive its negative impact, the copy-and-paste function has led to a number of unexpected problems and concerns about electronic note writing and its impact on the culture of medicine, including reducing the credibility of the recorded findings, clouding clinical thinking, limiting proper coding, and robbing the chart of its narrative flow and function.