Accidents

Dallas Hospital Ebola Incident

A man suffering from Ebola was mistakenly sent home from a Dallas hospital. He later returned to hospital, was diagnosed but died; two nurses contracted Ebola but survived.

On 26th September 2014, a Dallas hospital mistakenly sent home a man who had the Ebola virus having  missed what would have appeared to be an obvious potential case: a Liberian citizen with fever and  abdominal pain who said he had recently travelled from Liberia. The man later returned to the hospital,  was eventually diagnosed with the illness, but subsequently died. Two nurses that had treated the man  also contracted the virus but later recovered.

There have been mixed reports on the cause of the problem, but it is clear that external social phenomena  such as the Ebola outbreak, which are outside the hospital’s Electronic Health Record (EHR) system and  processes, can change the safety significance of data held in the EHR. If the importance of the data is not  recognised and elevated appropriately in the support tools and processes, then the risk of unintended  harm can increase. This conclusion is reinforced by system vendors who subsequently updated their  systems to reflect the Ebola crisis in light of the Dallas incident.

This incident highlights the importance of the completeness and format Data Properties, in that information  about the Ebola outbreak was apparently either not available, or not available in a usable form, to decision  makers.

Links 

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ebola-virus-outbreak/texas-hospital-makeschanges-afterebola-  patient-turned-away-n217296
(accessed 29 November 2017).