Still more thoughts on problems with EMRs and who or what is responsible for the patient

Here is a link to a discussion of more problems with electronic medical records (EMRs) that ties in with the issue of individual versus group responsibility.

The particular case involved a patient at an academic medical center in which

It took three days for the patient's care team to realize that the results entered into his EMR were for a biopsy they did not order of a lesion he did not have. Before the error was recognized, it had caused the patient "tremendous pain and mental anguish."

The author, John Goodman, continues with a theme I have ranted about before, (see here) the increasing lack of individual responsibility for patient care and the replacement with "team care" and computers systems are, of course,increasingly part of the team.

At bottom, the error got as far as it did because of the "medical team" approach - no single person was responsible for this patient's care. Each person relied on the (erroneous) electronic medical record for his view of the whole.

We seem to be replacing personal physician responsibility with "systems".

With so much rhetoric these days about instilling professionalism in medical students and house officers how can individual responsibility be given such short shrift? In 2003 the ACGME eliminated the following statement from their pronouncements:

Physicians must recognize their obligation is not discharged at any given time or any given day.

No, that is not a typo -they eliminated what used to be considered a fundamental principle of the doctor-patient relationship,that the physician is responsible for his patient

I believe that it is not coincidental that the same ACGME in their 2003 general core competencies statement mentions "systems" or "system" seven times but saw no reason to include the statement quoted above. The authors of the competencies are more concerned with team play, group dynamics,system this and system that, and conserving society's resources and fostering social justice than in inculcating in medical trainees a sense of individual responsibility for their individual patients, which is what I thought it was all about.