Joseph Rugg's Health Law Blog

Electronic medical records don’t always reflect what really happens during an examination. Physicians are so busy checking off boxes and keying in vital signs that sometimes they spend more time with the virtual patient than the real one.

“Many of us recognized that there was a gap between what the medical record claimed was done on the patient, in a sense, and the actual execution of the task,” Dr. Abraham Verghese, a professor at Stanford University’s School of Medicine and best-selling novelist, said in a Thursday Wall Street Journal article. “It reflects an increasing dependence on technology and paying lip-service to the actual examination of the patient,” he said.

Creators of electronic medical records never envisioned that the technology might actually decrease the quality of patient care. Instead, they saw a world where medical errors would drop because charts could be easily accessed and read. They also hoped that electronic records would result in fewer duplicated tests and lower costs. Yet, the difficulty of using many of these systems means that, in some cases, it’s encroaching upon the quality of patient care. It’s a lesson for CIOs — the very technology they implement to solve a problem can actually make that problem worse if they don’t think carefully about the people using it.

See on blogs.wsj.com

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