Robert B. Doherty, senior vice president of governmental affairs and public policy at the American College of Physicians, blogs on why physicians hate electronic health records.
He uses the analogy of a car mechanic being compelled to follow the seemingly irrational dictates of a system like EHR’s.
Mr. Doherty notes that the RAND Corporation reported that EHRs ”outranked all other factors as a cause of career dissatisfaction among physicians.”
“Physicians approved of EHRs in concept and appreciated having better ability to remotely access patient information and improvements in quality of care,” the RAND researches wrote.
But, ”for many physicians, the current state of EHR technology significantly worsened professional satisfaction in multiple ways. Aspects of current EHRs that were particularly common sources of dissatisfaction included poor usability, time-consuming data entry, interference with face-to-face patient care, inefficient and less fulfilling work content, inability to exchange health information, and degradation of clinical documentation.”
The overarching problem, the RAND authors contend, is that “no other industry, to our knowledge, has been under a universal mandate to adopt a new technology before its effects are fully understood, and before the technology has reached a level of usability that is acceptable to its core users.”
Mr. Doherty then offers five steps to address the EHR nightmare.
