Thursday, March 27, 2008

The adoption of electronic medical records

In an ars technica piece from yesterday Jonathan Gitlin discussed the ins and outs of electronic medical records. He opened with:

Doctors' poor handwriting might be a cliché, but being able to accurately read medical records can often be a matter of life and death. The ubiquity of the personal computer has allowed the clinic to enter the digital age, and given that computers excel at managing information, the development of electronic health records (EHR) has been a no-brainer.

That’s part of the problem. Maybe we’d all be better off if more thought was put into development and implementation. Read the rest here.

Via Kevin M.D.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

the signal/noise ratio in EMR notes has gone way down compared to the old hand written ones. This has the potential to wipe out any potential communication gains.

ED docs in our EMR system have told me they've given up on reading old notes in many cases due to the difficulty with finding the valuable information in the template driven mess created from previous visits.