Why a Dallas Hospital Initially Misdiagnosed an Ebola-patient With Viral Gastroenteritis

The hospital had prepared for the possibility that Ebola would arrive in its emergency room. It had adopted a Centers for Disease Control screening checklist to identify patients with fever who had travelled from the region of West Africa beset by Ebola. (Full disclosure: my research center and I advised the C.D.C. on the design of its checklists.) The staff had rehearsed the event. And, on September 24th, when just such a traveller arrived, the triage nurse who saw him actually asked the proper questions and flagged in the medical chart that he was a potential concern for Ebola.

Then how could the physician miss the risk of Ebola and discharge the patient with a diagnosis of a low-grade viral gastroenteritis?

Simply because hospital EHRs are not designed for the massive data we currently aggregate an every patient:

For instance, staff routinely put flags about concerns in medical charts and computer systems and then are surprised when doctors fail to notice them buried among all the other information.