Short-Term Solutions to Correct the Known EHR Problems Will Be Insufficient

In a recent article about the defects of the EHR in theHarvard Business Review, there was a passage that briefly but directly summarized many of the problems of current EHRs (see:To Combat Physician Burnout and Improve Care, Fix the Electronic Health Record). Note that the title of the article suggested that these EHR fixes were necessary in order to partly correct physician burn-out. Below is that passage:The EHR is a lot more than merely an electronic version of the patient ’s chart.It has also become the control panel for managing the clinical encounter through clinician order entry. Moreover, through billing and regulatory compliance, it has also become a focal point of quality-improvement efforts. While some of these efforts actually have improved quality and patient safety, many others served merely to “buff up the note” to make the clinician look good on “process” measures, and simply maximize billing. Mashing up all these functions — charting, clinical ordering, billing/compliance and quality improvement — inside the EHR has been a disaster for the clinical user, in large part because the billing/compliance function has dominated.The pressure from angry physician users has produced a medieval solution: Hospital and clinics have hired tens of thousands of scribe sliterally to follow clinicians around and record their notes and orders into the EHR.Only in health care, it seems, could we find a way to “automate” that ended up adding staff and costs!...
Source: Lab Soft News - Category: Laboratory Medicine Authors: Tags: Cost of Healthcare Electronic Health Record (EHR) Healthcare Business Healthcare Information Technology Hospital Executive Management Quality of Care Source Type: blogs