I don't understand why anyone would have done this....

Former Ga. technician falsified mammogram reports

Sharon Holmes found a lump in her left breast quite by accident. At work one day as a high school custodian, her hand brushed up against her chest and she felt a knot sticking out. She was perplexed. After all, just three months earlier, she had been given an all-clear sign from her doctor after a mammogram.

A new mammogram in February 2010 showed she in fact had an aggressive stage 2 breast cancer. The horror of the discovery was compounded by the reason: The earlier test results she had gotten weren't just read incorrectly. They were falsified.

She wasn't alone in facing this news. The lead radiological technologist at Perry Hospital in Perry, a small community about 100 miles south of Atlanta, had for about 18 months been signing off on mammograms and spitting out reports showing nearly 1,300 women were clear of any signs of breast cancer or abnormalities.

The tech was signing various radiologists' names to the documents in order to avoid the paperwork she found onerous. So basically, due to her laziness and lack of work ethic, several women had delayed treatment, and they've had more radical treatment than they might otherwise have had. For this, thanks to a plea deal, she'll serve up to six months plus spend 10 years on probation, unable to work in health care in that time, and pay a fee of $12,500. That seems awfully light considering any of these women might have died thanks to her.

We tend to trust our health providers, sometimes too much, perhaps. While it's one thing for a patient to suffer in some way because of a simple or complex series of mistakes, it's another thing entirely when someone is doing something deliberate without regard for the consequences. FOrtunately those folks are in the minority, hopefully.

I am assuming that these were done through paper charts, and that an electronic health record (EHR) was not in place, because if it had been, then only those with access to the radiologists' credentials (smart card, password, etc.) could have signed for them, making it harder to forge a signature. I suppose it's possible to mess with the system, but it's much less likely than what you can do with paper. Every click I do in the patient's record is recorded, I'm sure, and even if I can't see all the trail, the clinical analysts can. So this is one more argument for implementing an EHR on top of the governmental assistance given.