To Drive Value, EHRs Need to Actually be Usable

The following is a guest article by Khalid Al-Maskari, Founder and CEO of Health Information Management Systems (HiMS)
EHRs are ubiquitous because they’re useful – but how useful are they really, and to whom?
The truth is that an EHR by definition serves multiple masters, satisfying some more than others. For many clinicians, EHRs have actually been a disservice, a major factor in burnout. That’s because they weren’t invented to help clinicians in the first place.
“Many EHR products were designed with billing, payer requirements, and meaningful use criteria in mind rather than clinician use, resulting in a user experience laden with data entry that causes decreased productivity and efficiency, and a diminished patient-physician relationship,” researchers wrote in the Journal of the American Medical informatics Association in 2019. It still holds true.
If the patient-clinician relationship is diminished, outcomes will suffer.
Wanted: More Patient Face Time
When physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, radiologists, nurses, case managers, peer supports, therapists, and others use an EHR, they commonly have trouble with nonlinear workflows, history lookups, information handoffs within teams, turning encounters into notes, turning notes into billing codes, prescribing meds, ordering labs, and marshaling data to prove value-based care. Users are doomed to excessive clicking, scrolling, page-switching, and toggling. The upshot? What should be patient face time becomes ...

Source: EMR and HIPAA - October 10, 2023 Category: Information Technology Authors: Guest Author Tags: Ambulatory EMR-EHR Health IT Company Healthcare IT EHR UI EHR Usability Health Information Management Systems Hims Khalid Al-Maskari Patient Care Patient-Provider Relationship Value Based Care Source Type: blogs