Of course, how many doctors offices try and go it alone and don’t have this in place. Far too many!!

You can make it more complicated……say…….for datamining. Make it easier for business or government to find out more about you. But if your purpose is just to take care of patients, a fairly simple database or even Excel file is enough. Does the EMR exist to facilitate patient care, or to facilitate government intrusion or drug marketing?

EMR’s are complicated because we MAKE them complicated.

MLO- Amen.

I have heard many older and younger health care professionals describe incredibly bad systems. Make no mistake, the guys creating these systems would be fired in any other field for not doing their actual job!

Medicine is not the only field that has to have 365/24/7 up time. Try running a phone system. Outside of actual computer companies, that’s where the best talent is. After that, the closest you come are those dealing with banking and regulation.

This is, to a large degree, the fault of the medical field itself. They don’t consider non-physicians worthy of pay. The cream of the crop go to where the money is. Until that issue is solved, you are going to continue to see bad systems.

Or, Google really will be the default provider for all medical informatics.

Where there may be a generation gap in is the area of trust. The older generation of docs have seen computer technology develop from it’s infancy. Often they were the ones driving it programming an Apple IIe at home. They know how unreliable it can be, and how all the points of potential failure are not usually predictable up front. Also they take privacy concerns and their obligation to protect it much more seriously than a generation that have grown up in the goldfish bowl world of facebook and myspace. They have more discomfort with “trust me” contracts from venders because they have been burned before and know promises are not certainties.

Look up the career of Dr. Ed Roberts, family doc in rural Georgia before you denigrate the technology aptitude of older docs. It is a really cool story. While you are at it, remind yourself of how text messaging got Mark Foley caught. The electronic technologies cited (text messaging, blackberries, facebook) give the illusion of much more privacy than they provide and therefore have no place in medical care.

With a paper record in a quality locking fire-resistant file, you don’t need cumbersome on-site backup plans or risky off-site storage. Remember the company in Florida that cut doctors off from their medical records if they didn’t pay massive new fees that they weren’t expecting? Remember the transcriptionist in Pakistan who threatened to post American patients medical notes on the web in a pay dispute? Just last month, the controlled drug database in Virginia was hacked and extortion demands made! The state of Virginia has access to IT expertise and hardware that practitioners can only dream of and they can’t keep it safe.

My generation grew up playing with computers in elementary school, and are used to be around it. The last few years I’ve watched my parents (smart people, but only typically tech-knowledgeable) be befuddled by text messaging, blackberries, facebook and other info. Most EMR’s / Databases aren’t much more complex than facebook/myspace, I deal with them everyday.

To ‘EMRs Suck’, can’t you say similar things about the paper companies and their records, or the evil fax machine makers? Sure, I think the med-mal system is broke, and EMRs make things easier for them, but if it can result in better patient care or easier workflow, I’m all for it. What other industry is still stuck on paper records like the medical field is?