We created the electronic health record, but if we can’t figure out how to contain it, it may just destroy us.
A recent study at Johns Hopkins University indicated that hospital interns — physicians at perhaps their most formative stage of training — spend only about 12 percent of their time interacting with patients. By contrast, they spend 40 percent of their time — more than 3 times as much — interacting with hospital information systems. The flesh-and-blood patient is getting buried under gigabytes of data.
The Drawbacks of Data Driven Medicine by Dr Richard Gunderman in this month’s Atlantic Monthly.
A must read for docs and patients alike. Comments section rocks too.
I can remember spending 30 minutes assessing a patient’s, speech, language, cognition and swallowing functions. She was normal. But it took me 90 minutes to document that she was WNL. In all fairness, I was brand new to using a very old/outdated version of Meditech, but it would’ve taken me 10 minutes tops to hand-write that report. I hear my local hospital is updating their system – hopefully it’s more intuitive and easier to navigate.
The worst part is that so much of this data may not even be easily interchangeable with other organizations. With the push for the digitization of this data, many private parties have jumped in to create software. It’s not necessarily in their interests to have their own programs “play nice” with others!