Phil Gingrey: “The doctor sees a patient maybe a couple of times a year over a long period of time. The chart gets thicker and thicker.…”

“The doctor sees a patient maybe a couple of times a year over a long period of time. The chart gets thicker and thicker. Sheets are put in, not tabbed, they are out of order. The doctor may not know even when the patient was last seen if they are not a good historian. The gentleman from Pennsylvania talked about this earlier, about medical errors. The gentleman from Texas mentioned it, and I think the gentleman from Georgia, too; that the Institute of Medicine statistics, hopefully they are not accurate, because that is an astronomical number of deaths and injuries that they say occur each year because of medical errors. But as the gentleman pointed out, even one is too many. A lot of it is because of this sloppy medical recordkeeping. So, yes, it is definitely a problem and needs some immediate attention.”