Poor record keeping and malfunctioning technology has contributed to deaths and mistreatment at the border from 2013 to 2018, according to Politico.
Death records of 22 Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees from 2013 and 2018 were cited in a lawsuit brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center and others in August, alleging "centralized policies, practices, and failures of meaningful oversight" have led to death and mistreatment by ICE.
"You can't take proper care of patients if you don't document care," Stan Huff, chief medical informatics officer at Intermountain Healthcare, told Politico.
Lawyer Rebekah Fletcher, a Seattle lawyer with KIND added to Politico, Homeland Security records are "a little bit of a black hole," especially related to children.
"We don't tend to see if a child received care, specialty care, at DHS," she said.
The lawsuit alleges "delays in medical care, refusals to accommodate disabilities, and nearly constant isolation."
"Conditions in detention are so brutal that many people are forced to abandon viable claims for immigration relief and accept deportation out of a desperate desire to escape the torture they are enduring in detention on U.S. soil," according to the lawsuit, Politico reported.
Even when doctors are preparing to treat a patient thoroughly, they are hamstrung by poor recordings of a patient's medical history, according to the report.
"I typically get a combination of scanned paper records and some printouts from electronic medical records," University of Southern California emergency medicine Dr. Parveen Parmar told Politico. "The records are challenging to read, generally completely disorganized, and records often reflect minimal/poor charting that doesn't meet a community standard of care."
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