Will it make “your life is hell for the next year?”
The answer is yes. It takes about 6-12 months for electronic records to fully manifest into the patient workflow, and for doctors to feel totally comfortable with the system.
It demonstrates how poorly designed many of the programs are, evidenced by the lack any kind of physician input in the user interface.
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- Funding electronic medical records and bailing out the Big Three automakers
- Gerald Ford: A waste of end-of-life care?
- Are poor products to blame for the slow adoption of EMRs?
- EMRs and EHRs
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We totally agree it takes time for adoption and to get to a critical mass of patients in the system to realize the benefits. The pain, on the other hand, is often due the the proprietary nature of the design of the products and the feature function wars that are the nature of antiquated proprietary business model. They compete on how pretty their screens are and bells and whistles, not on simplicity and time to value.
Dr. L. Gordon Moore recently warned colleagues at the 2008 Scientific Assembly of the American Academy of Family Physicians to watch out for “monolithic and expensive” IT vendors, who have not given practitioners the right tools to better care for patients. He even likened the vendors to Pozni schemers. Unfortunately, Dr. Moore’s descriptions ring too true for practitioners. The healthcare industry has muddled through taxing, electronic health systems that really only work for IT vendors to make money. That is why we support Rep. Pete Stark’s recent proposal, which establishes federal standards and deadlines for a national, interoperable electronic health records (EHRs) network and promotes open source healthcare IT. VistA is used across the entire VA health system and 65% of physicians trained over the past decade have used it. OpenVista, the commercialized version of VistA, is now in use in dozens of facilities. OpenVista participants share information and are empowered to drive the innovation themselves. There’s no game playing here.
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