And I think this video summarizes why quite nicely. The youtube comments (surprisingly) are intelligent and worth a cursory glance.
The video promotes #letdoctorsbedoctors, which in turn promotes athenahealth. I glanced at the athenahealth* website, and their demo looks an awful lot like Epic with a sleeker UI. I'm not exactly sure what they're offering, unless it's an "out of the box" version of Epic. Every feature in the demo is available in Epic, but in Epic it requires tons of analysis, build, debugging, and rebuilding.
Given the similarity to Epic, I'm curious to see how many of athenahealth's employees used to work in a certain cow pasture in Verona.
EHRs do suck. And with all of the MU regulations, EHRs are never going to get better. The government requires reportable data, and that requires data entry. Unless "exam room stenographer" becomes a new job title, doctors are the only ones able to enter all the data that the government wants. The other option is for the government to get out of the way (aka "deregulation") and let doctors be doctors.
*I'm assuming that the lower case and lack of spacing is part of their trademark. Unless you're e.e. cummings, you should use proper punctuation and capitalization.
