<p>I don’t think some of you are getting it. Some of the EHR systems as implemented today are getting in the way of patient care. There is a fantasy here that doctors are resisting this. Let me be clear, doctors LOVE the concept since everything else we do are already electronic or have been made easier by technology. Why wouldn’t we love it? It would make record keeping great, optimize billing, and eliminate so much administrative headaches. Most systems hinder these goals because they just can’t handle the needs of all specialists well. The first EHR I used was in the VA back in 1999. It was fantastic for managing hospitalized or office patients. It might not work well for other specialists.</p>
<p>I used one at a hospital that required me to scroll through multiple menus in order to be updated on my patients and erase multiple outdated hospital protocols that were potentially harmful to my patients. The nurses loved the system. While it was great for them, it was horrible for me and other specialists. In the OR, I have seen anesthesiologists scrolling through bad EHR systems for several minutes ignoring their anesthetized patient because the hospital’s EHR wasn’t anesthesia friendly. How would you like your anesthesiologist spending a lot of frustrating minutes paying more attention to menus than your care? I promise you, you wouldn’t tell them to just “get over it”. But that is the heart of the problem.</p>
<p>I now use a hospital EHR that is PC friendly but not Mac or Android friendly. So, I have to be at the hospital to use the features. But then, the hospital only gives computer access to their nursing staff. So, I have to interrupt a nurse from patient care to access the computer, so I can then log onto the software to do my work. But then, I can’t email the record or transfer it to my office. Sometimes we can’t even find other physician notes. It was so bad that the hospital reintroduced paper charts to go along with the EHR. It gets better, the ER is on a diffetent system that is wonderful for them. I get an emergency patient to the operating room and guess what? I have no access to the info I need because the OR EHRs don’t access the ER EHR system. This was a multi-million dollar EHR system that the hospital has to replace because it sucks.</p>
<p>These are the reasons why doctors aren’t enthusiastic. They aren’t all working well in real life. Can you imagine having WIFI optimized for a few computers that causes havoc for others? That analogy sums up the EHR issue.</p>