Habush Habush and Rottier

Monday, October 26, 2015

EHRs Suck



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.

5 comments:

  1. You might be on to something with that "exam room stenographer" idea.

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  2. what we "saved" by giving up transcription and med records room expenses we lost more than tenfold with EHR

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  3. Funny, I was just at Epic for training, and one of the instructors played this video after break.

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  4. I saw the same video at the same cow pasture!

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  5. One of the best comments:
    copdoc414 said:
    +ZDoggMD "I wish it was a joke" sums it up. The video is funny. These poorly written EHR systems are not funny. EHR appears written for the data miners and billing, not patient care.


    And I say:
    You know why, right? Meaningful Use, CMS, Medicaid/care, and all the regulations are driving the focus towards data mining and billing. Unless some lawmakers go in and remove some regulations for a change, things are just going to get worse.

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