Good IT can save lives.
We all want to move toward a model of care that puts the patient at the center. But that model depends on coordination. If you think about it, each patient’s well-being is in the hands of many different doctors who don’t always talk to one another. Information technology that enables coordination of care can sometimes be as important to a person’s health as a therapeutic breakthrough. What do you think about the use of electronic health records?
Health records in any form are a two edged sword. When I've reviewed my and my children's records, I've found that physicians have sometimes written down what the text book says should be the case instead of what I reported to the doctor. On one occassion a doctor who could not diagnose the problem wrote in a personal attack on me, which has followed me for years, despite the fact that I had asked him to verify the problem with a second physician. I think patients should have the legal right to have any statement in their medical records that they dispute have their statement accompany the physician's. It's time to get things right.
As a doctor who is in the front lines, EMR sounds good but has a long way to go and definitely does not necessarily save lives. As an emergency physician, this need to input all orders into the computer / have the patient get registered before orders are given actually can delay care. The other big problem is there are literally 100s of different EMRs and none of them communicate with each other and there are no standards for how these records should look (similar to car standards). I use Practice Fusion, a free on-line EMR, and I love it, even more so than paper. Unfortunately, there are many EMRs that are very poor and worse than paper. So yes, Good IT can save lives, but Bad IT can delay care.
Based on your experience Tom, how have the EHR systems you’ve used benefited you and a physician as well as your patients?
If EMRs were really beneficial, big Blue and the government would come out with one, give it to all providers for free.
As of now, there has never been an study (not paid for by a Vendor or 3rd party payer) showing any improvement in health care to patients. Pretty sad that multi-billion dollar EMR vendors having lobbied and paid off politicians continue shoveling their products onto physicians.
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