White Coat Notes: “Dr. Pamela Hartzband and Dr. Jerome Groopman of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, writing in [the] New England Journal of Medicine, warn that computers make it too easy for doctors to lose focus on the patients before them. Residents and doctors can cut and paste one another’s notes into the record, sacrificing the benefit of fresh eyes looking at a patient and distilling what is most relevant. Lab test results can flood the record with no selectivity on what matters for the current problem.”
Related posts:
- How electronic medical records can lead to coding fraud, and get doctors into major trouble
- Op-ed: Why doctors still balk at electronic medical records
- The unintended consequences of electronic records
- Electronic records and productivity loss
- Electronic medical records and the iPhone
- Adopting electronic records
- Electronic records and economic sense
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The tyranny of CMS and their threat of audits the main driver for outpatient EMR charting. Big fat boilerplate notes that satisfy the mandarins but otherwise sleep on thousands of scattered hard drives, never known about by most and rarely even searched for by the doctors who created them. They keep the salespeople of the software companies in shirts and I guess hardware vendors too, and they save some trees.
And think of all the fun that political opereatives of the future are going to have trolling hard drives for their opponents medical records!
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