LZ: Perhaps you’ve noticed that your doctor no longer comes into the exam room holding a paper chart in a manila folder, but a laptop or iPad instead.
He or she may also send any prescriptions you need right through the device – no more handing out prescriptions, with that barely legible signature on the bottom.
Your doctor is compiling your personal electronic health record, or EHR. It’s a digital version of a patient’s paper chart — a real-time record that make information available instantly and securely to those who are authorized to use them.
But what happens when there is a problem with the software that manages your personal EHR record? What if a scan image is unclear or dosage misrecorded due to a glitch in the software? MORE
Its no secret that EHRs are a nightmare, and the crony companies that run them are corrupt. The CEO of Epic is a huge Obama bundler. But why, you may wonder, are doctors using these systems if they suck so much?
The government requires all physicians to use them. Regardless of known security flaws and problems. They are not for taking care of patients. The EHR is a huge data mining operation. All those questions about smoking and alcohol use when you go in for a cold; asking about depression when you’re there for a sprained ankle. The government also requires e-prescribing now. Its not for your or the doctors convenience. One look at your prescription history reveals 90% of your health conditions.
They’re also a gold mine for hackers and identity thieves. Anthem in CA just lost millions of patients confidential information in a data breach. This is how the government “fixes” things.
My wife’s a nurse, and she says the EPIC software is a total pain in the ass, especially when hospitals implement it at the lowest possible cost. When their server goes down, they have to put notes on scraps of paper, and then enter them en masse when the server comes back up. It’s fucking stupid. Doing medicine with EPIC is like driving while texting. One’s attention is split all the time.
This is what I do for a living. I use EPIC and @avgdude12 is correct. If your healthcare company didn’t shell out enough bux to buy the top of the line edition, you are forever making little changes in the hope it gets better. With EPIC, you have pay for the best version and if you don’t, your employees will wish you had.
However, in about a year and a half of using EPIC, I have found all of the little shortcuts that make it much faster. Unfortunately, that does NOT help when you have untrained people scanning documents and turning the charts into a train wreck.
As for this:
Unclear images are mostly because one provider makes a copy of an old blank form that has questionable quality, the patient fills it out, then they scan that crap into their software, print it when another provider wants it and then they fax it which reduces the legibility even further. And most of those are twisted so when YOU scan it, your EHR looks like shit. The best documentation is what is interfaced into the EHR and that is always preferable.
As for dosage being misrecorded, that has been a problem since doctors with bad penmanship started hand writing prescription forms. And paper charts are no better, no more accurate, or no more legible than an EHR. I know from personal experience.
Mistakes are always made. You just make correcting them a priority when you find them.