Comments on: Guest Article: Why Doctors Hate Electronic Medical Records

By: Mattias Ganslandt

Mattias Ganslandt — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:57:25 +0000

The European Commission’s Communication on Cross-border Interoperability of Electronic Health Records called for action to support a wider understanding of interoperability amongst key stakeholders. It has therefore funded a Support Action to promote interoperability among personal health systems and to other eHealth systems. The SmartPersonalHealth project started on 1st of January 2010 and will run for one year.

We want to discuss some of these issues at the upcoming online forum about eHealth and standards on February 25th, 4-8 pm GMT on www.talkstandards.com which will raise some of these points and hopefully contribute interesting insight into this fast moving sector.

By: EMR Medical

EMR Medical — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 14:13:52 +0000

i can't agree with you.. Nowadays many doctors are now taking advantage of the internet to conduct web consultations. we able to access patient data from anywhere in the world via a secure connection even allows the doctor to conduct web consultations or generate reports from home. Health maintenance reminders that can be automatically generated from an EMR system also contribute to providing improved patient care.

By: EMR Medical

EMR Medical — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 07:13:52 +0000

By: Lisa Breza

Lisa Breza — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 23:33:55 +0000

Mr. Delcalzo,
As a CNO I sit on many committees and tasks forces with physicians. We are in the process of fully implementing CPOE. Recently, I had a physician, who is techno savy, and one of the leaders in our organization who brought up the exact point you made. His group has a high volume of patients in the hosptial daily and routinely one of them rounds in hospital. He indicated that the computer takes 2-3 minutes more for each patient and if he multiplied that by his volume, by week, he has added more time to his work week. Although he wants to be supportive, and perhaps may see the long term benefits, he finds it counter productive. Add to that the system being slow, we now have an irrate physician calling administration complaining. Not to mention he has now gotten his colleagues to support his negative experience and wants to know what's in it for him to continue.

As you posted a few months ago, have you had any luck in improving efficencies for physicians to avoid discouragement on their part. As I understand their argument, I want them to see the long term benefits and prevent them from discouraging other physicians.

By: Jack Shaw

Jack Shaw — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 01:24:13 +0000

Knowing nothing of medicine other than having been occasionally ill, but having spent a lifetime (40+ years) in IT, there's nothing new in the laments of Dr. Cast that hasn't been repeated umpteen times since I was in the trade — and probably 100 times that since the inception of Babbage's engine:

1. Prospective users aren't consulted as to their requirements and the variables in their clinical/administrative environments.
2. “Innovation” and other cleverness takes precedence over (very likely ill-defined) standards, leading to incompatibility between/among components and systems.
3. Users — not developers — need to test the systems in their working environment against measurable standards of performance.

In “Quality is Free”, Mr. Crosby defined the highest quality for piecework and manufacturing as “zero defects” — rework to repair imperfections costs more than assuring those imperfections don't occur to begin with. More importantly for quality in processes and systems, quality's highest measure is always in inverse proportion to the degree of “deviation from requirements”. Ergo, the energy spent to thoroughly and accurately define the requirements is the best ROI for obtaining the desired quality.

And it's the also the greatest guarantee of avoiding “GI” and the inevitably resulting “GO”.

By: John Delcalzo

John Delcalzo — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:18:47 +0000

The problem of “user experience” or speed of access to eHR has been a problem that Hospital IT departments often overlook and it often comes from overworked, under-funded IT departments that are trying to learn how to implement an eHR on the job.

We’ve actually seen the eHR actually add up to 90 minutes to a physician’s day. And no doctor can afford that.

A little bit of time paying attention to how long the doctor actually takes to get into a system, remember 12 passwords and then navigate through a patient record are the key issues most IT Directors doing eHR for the first time tends to miss.

By: Michael Kirsch, M.D

Michael Kirsch, M.D — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 19:22:51 +0000

EMR likely means emailing with patients, another free service for physicians to give away. See http://www.MDWhistleblower.blogspot.com

By: Jon

Jon — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 01:31:29 +0000

I don’t know if docs hate EMRs or not from a broad perspective, but this article is interesting about a health plan with a unique digital tool to help docs better manager Medicaid patients. I know that’s a big concern among doctors…how to keep better tabs on the health of Medicaid patients:
http://ourhealthcaresource.com/2009/08/18/physician-know-thy-patients/

By: CDanis

CDanis — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:17:07 +0000

After reading this article I began to have a greater understanding of the physicians point of view regarding IT/ EMR. I agreed with most of what the article was stating. For example these new systems need increased input from its users, such as the physicians and nurses. Also there need to be more steps in place to really make the transition of EMR implementation smoother. Because it does slow down productivity and may be costly. This article should copied or sent to all the major vendors and developers of these programs/ softwares. So they can improve the programs to tailor it more to the clinicians and not the healthcare organization.

By: ClickRich

ClickRich — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:34:59 +0000

A great article. I work with doctors and EMRs every day and this is the most lucid account of clinicians’ attitudes which I’ve heard or seen.
I think healthcare software needs to be rearchitected. At the moment it almost entirely is “monolithic”. That is to say that the data and logic is rigidly tied to the user interface and the latter is compromised by the former. We need to seperate them out and give the user interface designers the freedom to do their work.