EHR Fatigue

Electronic health records (EHR) are supposed to improve quality. While EHRs certainly are highly useful for information sharing, they may have adverse consequences. One issue may be that EHRs may induce fatigue in physicians and sap their needed energy/concentration away from their primary task: caring for patients. To test whether EHRs increase physician fatigue and…

EHR and physician burnout

Electronic health records (EHR) have the potential to greatly improve the quality of care. EHRs allow multi-specialty teams to access the same underlying medical information and eliminate the issue of miscommunication due to poor physician hand writing. At the same time, EHR increase data entry burden. Is the benefit of EHR worth the cost? One…

Death by 1000 clicks: Where EHRs went wrong

An interesting article over at Kaiser Health News on electronic health records (EHRs): But 10 years after President Barack Obama signed a law to accelerate the digitization of medical records — with the federal government, so far, sinking $36 billion into the effort — America has little to show for its investment…Today, 96 percent of…

EMR progress is too slow

Patients and providers should be able to securely access a patient’s medical record wherever they are.  Not having a patient’s full record could result in poor treatment choices and suboptimal patient outcomes.  The dream of a seamless, cloud-based electronic medical record (EMR), however, is years away.  Consider the example shared by CMS administrator Seema Verma…

The downside of EHRs

Electronic Health Records can help doctors access the information they need regardless of whether they have treated you before. Setting up integrated health care systems or systems where EHR networks are interoperable can improve this facility across healthcare organizations. However, this approach is not without risks, as shown by this recent hacking episode at Anthem.…

Health IT in Four Countries

How have different countries developed their health IT systems? A paper by Adler-Milstein et. al in Health Affairs provides some insight. I summarize their findings below. Australia. In the 1990s-early 2000s, the government supported the adoption of EHRs through federal incentives to general practitioners. These efforts focused primarily on EHRs with e-prescribing. In 2005 the…

Do EHRs increase “upcoding”?

Upcoding occurs when physician or hospitals artificially increase the patient’s severity of illness. For instance, a hospital may record additional comorbidities. In Medicare’s inpatient prospective payment systems (IPPS), Medicare reimburses hospitals more for caring for patients who are sicker. Some health policy experts worry that electronic health records (EHRs) will decrease the cost of documenting…