A large part of the savings President Barack Obama aims to wring from the healthcare system are predicated on widespread adoption of electronic medical records.
In fact, the initiative is so important that the Obama administration set aside $20 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and appointed an EMR czar to push doctors’ offices and hospitals to start using the systems.
But as an Ohio cardiologist and blogger, Dr. Westby Fisher, writes at MedCity.com, physicians themselves could prove to be the initiative’s biggest hurdle.
Every day he’s inundated with medical reports requiring his electronic approval before they can be added to patients’ electronic medical records:
“I find that I am increasingly becoming the log jam that prevents the information from flowing to the electronic medical record. As more and more results and reports require the electronic signature, it is becoming increasingly difficult for some of us who do not spend the day at the computer screen to promptly sign our results and move them to the chart.”
Each report requiring approval means minutes spent downloading PDF files or scrolling through pop-up windows to find virtual dotted line, Fisher notes.
“Multiply those times by hundreds of results or reports a day and it’s no wonder doctors remain skeptical of a computer’s ability to save us time. The more tests and electronic signature requirements must pass beneath my typing fingers, there is a limit as to how fast it can find its way to the patient’s chart.”
And multiply one Ohio cardiologist by the thousands of doctors the administration expects to begin using EMRs and the “log jam” quickly assumes epic proportions.
As usual with web technology, there’s a shortcut, he writes: “you can highlight all of the results at once and click “Sign-’Em-All” and, presto, they’re on the chart.”
“But doesn’t that defeat the purpose of checking and reviewing the results? Sadly, I fear that human nature will do just that as doctors look for ways to relieve the log jam that appears in their result inbasket each day.”
Despite these attendant problems, don’t count Fisher among the anti-tech Luddites looking to smash the nearest server with a wooden shoe:
“Not that this is bad, mind you. I think it’s great that all of this information will eventually be added on-line for all to see. There is no doubt that communication will be improved.”