The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has awarded Oregon Health & Science (OHSU) University in Portland a $1 million grant to fund research aimed at reducing medical errors associated with EHRs.

Many believe the health IT tools will benefit healthcare in various ways and government has invested heavily in them, but with big data come big challenges. ”Most tools used in medicine require knowledge and skills of both those who develop them and use them,” said William Hersh, MD, chair of the department of medical informatics and clinical epidemiology, in an Oct. 11 statement. “Even tools that are themselves innocuous could be detrimental to patient care if used improperly,”

OHSU informatics researchers will use the grant money to develop simulations that test clinicians’ abilities to recognize errors presented in EHRs. Jeffrey Gold, MD, principal investigator, professor of medicine and program director for pulmonary critical care and critical care fellowship, hopes to use these clinical scenarios to learn about interaction with EHRs, train EHR users and find ways to better manage electronic data.