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JONATHAN RISKIND Times Leader Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON – A report released this month helps make the case for a proposal by Rep. Tom Marino, R-Lycoming Township, to give health care providers who use money-saving electronic records more legal protections, proponents say.

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But a critic of Marino’s bill says granting legal immunity for reporting medical errors caused by faulty electronic records deprives patients of the right to seek compensation and takes away incentives for records vendors and the health care community to make needed improvements.

When Marino introduced his Safeguarding Access for Every Medicare Patient Act in October, he said it would create a system for reporting potential errors in electronic records without the admission of the mistake being used as a legal admission of wrongdoing. The bill also applies to Medicaid patients, and since so many providers accept patients from the federal health care programs for seniors and the poor, Marino’s bill effectively would apply to most of the medical community.

“Many providers are reluctant to use electronic records because they believe the practice will make them more vulnerable to unnecessary legal action,” said Marino, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, when he unveiled the bill in late October.

The report released Nov. 8 by the nonprofit Institute of Medicine, which was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said the federal government is spending billions of dollars to encourage hospitals and other health care providers to more widely use electronic health records, but also needs to develop a method for technology vendors and providers to report record-related injuries or deaths. Reporting “events related to patient safety should be mandatory for vendors and voluntary, confidential and non-punitive for care providers,” the report said.

“Just as the potential benefits of health IT are great, so are the possible harms to patient safety if these technologies are not being properly designed and used,” said Gail L. Warden, president emeritus of Henry Ford Health System and chairman of the committee, in a statement when the report was released Nov. 8. “To protect patients, industry and government have a shared responsibility to ensure greater transparency, accountability and reporting of health IT-related medical errors.”

Joel White, executive director of the Health IT Now coalition that includes providers, employers and insurance companies, said Marino’s bill is a way to help put some of the Institute of Medicine’s recommendations into effect.

“The question is how to create a system that identifies and allows people to report errors and fix them without engaging in a punitive environment,” said White.

Marino’s bill wouldn’t stop a lawsuit from going forward if an electronic records-related error – for instance, an intravenous infusion machine that dispenses the wrong dosage – occurred, White said. But it would protect the confidentiality of a reporting system designed to prevent the same mistake from happening again, he said.

But Williamsport attorney Cliff Rieders, a past president of the Pennsylvania Association of Justice, said granting the legal immunity Marino seeks in his bill will discourage, not encourage, improvements to faulty electronic record systems.

“Giving doctors immunity is exactly the wrong thing to be doing,” said Rieders, a medical malpractice attorney and a board member of the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority. “If you say to people that there is no repercussion to doing the wrong thing, you are going to encourage the wrong thing.”

The Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority is an independent state agency whose 11-member board is appointed by the governor and legislature and is made up of physicians, attorneys, nurses, a pharmacist and a non-healthcare worker. It is charged with taking steps to reduce and eliminate medical errors.

Marino’s bill has not yet received a hearing in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over health care issues. But Marino also hopes to see the bill referred to his judiciary committee, his office said.