L.Gordon Moore may not please everybody when he talks about his concerns with the current state of electronic medical record software, but I’m pretty sure he’s not at all alone in his observations among independent practitioners…
When you put an EMR into a primary care practice, your life is hell for the next year. EMR vendors aren’t really giving us what we need. We have to make a distinction between a robust EMR with decision support tools, and one that is just being marketed as a way to improve coding. Beware of the monolithic, expensive IT vendor, because there are always things they don’t do well. The only ones making money from most of these products are the vendors selling them.
That’s from a speech Dr. Moore gave a few weeks ago at the Scientific Assembly of the American Academy of Family Physicians. I’m hoping we might see a healthy discussion over at THCB, under the recent post on Dr. Moore’s concerns by Shahid Shah.
I really think there’s a lot to be said for how much more progress we need to be making in terms of usability, affordability, and reliability in the electronic health record space… The more people, like Dr. Moore, who point out the deficiencies, the more vendors will take notice. (I hope.)
Justen,
Your writings are appreciated and I am glad to see you are back on this stopic. Hope your readership has not evaporated. Patients are continually endangered by these devices and no one truly knows how bad it is. Computer caused death and injury over seas as evidence shows:
Man dies from trial overdose
The mother of a 27-year-old man who died during a cancer drugs trial said she felt like he had been murdered.
Gary Foster, from Waltham Abbey, Essex, was given double the amount of chemotherapy he should have been prescribed for testicular cancer.
His mother Coleen Foster said he was due to get married this month and had everything to live for.
University College London Hospital blamed the death on a computer system error in the set-up of the trial.
The hospital said it had reviewed its drugs testing procedures and processes and had “made all appropriate changes to improve patient safety in response to this accident”.
Best regards,
Menoalittle