By HANS DUVEFELT
IT GUY: Hey, Doc, don’t make up workarounds, use the EHR the way it was designed.
DOCTOR: Listen, your whole EHR is a workaround itself – around the way medicine is practiced.
– Hans Duvefelt, MD
This was a tweet I posted a while ago. I expected it to either go viral among doctors or catch the ire of administrators and IT folks. Neither happened. So I’m back on my soap box:
Imagine creating a computer simulation or video game that people expected to prepare them for or refine their skills in any given sport. Then, assume that this game altered the rules of the game – using a volley ball instead of a hockey puck, scoring goal attempts rather than goals, rewarding slowness rather than speed and so on.
Then, imagine you, the programmers/code writers, went to the team owners and proposed athletes and coaches should abandon the time-honored rules of the game and instead play like it plays out on the pixelated imitation you just created. And just to be clear: You, the programmer, actually never played the game yourself.
You’d get shown the door and sent back to the digital drawing board.
But that’s not what is happening in medicine.
FIRST: Is finding the clinically relevant information easier than, or at least as easy as, the regulatory information? (The cumbersome ways we have to enter information is a big topic, better covered separately.)
Here’s a silly example: One of the EMRs I work with displays prominently that the smoking assessment requirement has been satisfied, but I’ll be darned if I can see whether the patient smokes or not. Whom does the Holy Grail serve here?
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