January 24th, 2020

Podcast 249: Quality time with your EHR — or just time?

Why aren’t you able to navigate your electronic health record (EHR) as easily as you can find a recipe on, say, Google?

And, what about those requirements for documenting everything?

Listen to a chat with Julia Adler-Milstein, the author of an editorial that comments on a recent Annals of Internal Medicine study detailing the amount of time clinicians typically spend hunched over their EHRs during a patient visit.

Links:

Annals of Internal Medicine editorial

Annals paper on the time clinicians spend

Running time: 17 minutes

 

2 Responses to “Podcast 249: Quality time with your EHR — or just time?”

  1. Charles Carter says:

    That Annals invited an academic in informatics for the editorial is itself disheartening. If she spent 1/2 to 3/4 of her time seeing patients and actually having to use an EHR, her opinions would be of greater value.
    She does get some of the issues right, however. Problems lie both with regulatory/ administrative requirements and with EHR’s per se. Sadly, the former problem is nowhere better addressed than by Jerry Z Muller, a historian and author of The Tyranny of Metrics. Sadly because no one in medicine makes such an eloquent case.
    She commits a clearcut fallacy by equating time spent searching with efficiency. Some patients need more thorough review of records. Period.
    And she fails to acknowledge that the vast majority of physicians want computerized records that actually facilitate patient care and workflow.

  2. Jim Robertson says:

    Let’s take off the gloves for a minute. There are glaringly obvious problems with the installations of even the “best” EHRs. Witness the difference between two Epic Installations in Northern CA, one in an environment where collecting more money from the patient is not the intent (Kaiser Foundation Hospials/Permanente Clinics) and another at a large fee-for-service enterprise.

    In the latter, when trying to do a past surgical hx, Epic wouldn’t let me move on from entering “cataract surgery” because I didn’t encapsulate it in a manner that also included numerical codes that described the specific surgical procedure!.

    Grafting the EHR on top of billing software has precipitated a great deal of the angst faced by clinicians. In the end, it was part of what prompted me, who bought my first Mac in January 1984, to retire from the practice of medicine!

Clinical Conversations

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