Health records don’t always show when patients are dead. One researcher is trying to change that
While some clinical notes do reference a patient’s death, the file typically isn’t labeled deceased until another department verifies it, which is not always easy.
Health professor Neil Wenger was deep into a years-long study on seriously ill primary care patients when he uncovered a different but persistent issue: Many patients who were targeted for follow-up interventions had actually died, and their hospitals did not know about it.
It wasn’t what Wenger had set out to research. But it was unacceptable, he said, for health systems to lose track of seriously ill primary care patients who’d been treated on-site for years. To be clear, these were not one-time out-of-state patients who’d come in for a single visit.
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