Friday, June 15, 2012

Doctors are using electronic records more - but liking them less

Sarah Kliff writes Doctors are using electronic records more - but liking them less. "The doctors in this survey thought that electronic health records interfere with patient care: When they spend more time looking at a computer they’re spending less time interacting with a patient. They have also become more skeptical that electronic record keeping will reduce errors or improve efficiency."

I'm not surprised. Based on the systems I've seen and heard friends talk about, they all suck. I once sat with my doctor trying to guess what a medical acronym stood for because the system she used only used the full name and not the commonly used abbreviation. Other systems look like old terminal interfaces or early Windows systems at best.

1 comment:

The Dad said...

I've actually been pleased with my personal experience. I've seen my doc probably 4 times since they put a system in, and she is able to more easily reference my history, ask me followup questions from one visit to the next, and recall what meds she has prescribed in the past. Additionally, I can access all that info in an iPhone app, including my numbers, my active or past descriptions, and a record of past doc visits.

Just yesterday I had an optometrist, and they just implemented a system. So during the exam, she had to run through all the basics like where I work, past history, etc. In one column was the question "does patient use a computer at work". She was reading the questions down the screen but missed one that was directly to the right of that question, which was "distance from the computer". Since she didn't realize it was a followup to the previous, I answered (jokingly) "looks like about five feet" and she entered that in, not realizing my joke.