Johns Hopkins: Thanks to EHRs, time with patients seems “squeezed out” of medical training, investigator says

Question:  Who would have thought it?  That there is yet another potentially deadly unintended consequence of bad health IT and health IT hyper-enthusiasm?Suggested answer:  anyone who truly understands the issues at the intersection of medicine, information science, information technology, and Social Informatics - which probably excludes 95% of the health IT "experts", pundits and opportunists.Which only goes to show how dense such people can be - as the medical trainees of today will be treating them, their families, and their children in the future:Johns Hopkins MedicineRelease Date: 04/23/2013 Time with patients seems “squeezed out” of training, investigator says Medical interns spend just 12 percent of their time examining and talking with patients, and more than 40 percent of their time behind a computer, according to a new Johns Hopkins study that closely followed first-year residents at Baltimore’s two large academic medical centers. Indeed, the study found, interns spent nearly as much time walking (7 percent) as they did caring for patients at the bedside.I can honestly say much if not most of my time in training, several decades ago, was spent at the bedside.Compared with similar time-tracking studies done before 2003, when hospitals were first required to limit the number of consecutive working hours for trainees, the researchers found that interns since then spend significantly less time in direct contact with patients. C...
Source: Health Care Renewal - Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Tags: healthcare IT unintended consequences social informatics healthcare IT risks Johns Hopkins University Source Type: blogs