Well here is an article that is certainly no surprise to physicians. Report: Electronic Health Records May Not Be Good Cost-Cutter - by Rob Goszkowski
Any physician who has ever used an EMR (as I have for 15 years) knows with certainty that they do not cut costs. They increase overhead costs, decrease physician efficiencies, and contribute to growing dissatisfaction among doctors.
As hospitals move forward with Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE), more and more physicians are concerned about the time it will take to complete patient care related tasks. Physicians are spending more and more time with clerical duties and less and less time with the evaluation of patients.
Computerized medical records document a tremendous amount of data, but 90 percent or more is useless for the everyday patient care and decision making. Meaningful data has actually lessened as computerized data has increased. The attorneys and “big brother” data crunchers are the ones who utilize this useless data for tracking purposes and to hold things against physicians and healthcare workers.
Any good business advisor would tell you to hire people to do the clerical work so you can focus on patient care and treating more patients. But CPOE mandates that physicians do this clerical work and it is time consuming and inefficient for physicians.
The government mandates are short-sided and poorly planned with little input from the end-users.
ON THE AVENUES: “The Drinker” (A Book Review).
11 hours ago
Anyone who uses a PC in their daily work, knows that PCs have not saved time and effort over the years, but instead, have created more work, as managers and upper level executives have devised more and more reports that have to be created, just because computer users can create said reports. In a given week, I have to write about five to six executive reports, that otherwise, if I did not have a computer, I would not write because I would not have the resources.
ReplyDeleteThe creation of the requirement to create more and more reports to feed an ever growing government bureaucracy is caused when said bureaucracy must sustain itself and prove that it has value. I agree with Healthblogger when he says most of these reports have to intrinsic value. Who cares to know that 95% of the population has ear wax?
Having just started to implement EMR, if operating an EMR system is as big in the pain the butt as finding synching systems with our Operating system, and the installation, and configuration, then all of the scanning of old documents, I have to seriously question whether the move worth the expenditure and hassle....
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