Electronic medical records: Expensive . . . and ineffective?

Much ado has been made touting EMR’s improving quality of care. So far, the data doesn’t back that up:

Electronic health records — touted by policymakers as a way to improve the quality of health care — failed to boost care delivered in routine doctor visits, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
Of 17 measures of quality assessed, electronic health records made no difference in 14 measures, according to a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Comments

MLO
First caveat: I have not worked in the Health IT field – but I’m an IT Gal from way back with a usability and business process background.
From what I have seen in the IT and Health care literature surrounding health care IT, the health care IT guys are NOT doing due diligence before deploying so-called solutions. In no other industry would their behaviors be tolerated. IT should be created around natural efficiencies while addressing inefficiencies – not forcing a new work model.
Every time I read a so-called IT guru from the health care side I am thoroughly disgusted by their arrogance in claiming they “know” how to fix things before even investigating workflows. Workflows are different for different parts of any organization – and the underlying architecture has to be flexible enough so that the front-end can be what the audience needs it to be. That means that the billing people do not have the same interface that the doctor or nurse does!
Even as a patient I have seen major waste due to a lack of integrated IT. I’m not even going to touch the lack of security around most EMRs. Really, you guys need to fire almost every person designing your systems and get some experienced folks from other fields who know they don’t know your field and are willing to do the legwork to design a workable system.
Pax,
MLO
PS. My professional pet peeve is IT that thinks it is anything other than a service to a larger customer.
TBTAM
I agree with MLO. None of the EMR’s I have seen come anywhere near the efficiencies of my old medical chart with its one sheet problem summary on the front and patient-completed history sections.
We have gone electronic, and I spend more time charting than ever in my career, and feel less condfident when I review a chart that I am capturing all the info I need.
The EMR is defintiely a case where new is not necessarily better.

Electronic medical records: Expensive . . . and ineffective?

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