Gregor - I am certainly not going to defend the hodge-podge corporate patchwork we call an insurance industry in the US, but I think that is really not the culprit for the issues we are discussing. (There are other EHR issues for which it bears a lot of responsibility -- such as charge coding ridiculousness, for example.)
Something you said struck me as a little off, though. Making a patient well is not a task. It's a goal. It should be (and usually is) underlying the decisions the clinicians make in the emergency department, leading to various tasks that must often be performed at speed to save lives. In emergency medicine the EHR's biggest challenge is being able to adjust to the realities of rapidly-changing workflow but also has a feeling of being cohesive, consistent and useful. Paper records can be a nightmare. Agreed. BUT, and this is not an insignificant but from the part of the patient or the clinician, you can chart at them at the bedside without looking at them. That fact alone leads to increased feelings of engagement between doctor and patient. And more time for the doctor to actually learn what he or she needs to in order to make the patient well. As of yet, tablets and COWs don't work very well in real-world ED settings. I agree that EHRs are necessary for all the reasons you delineate, but they also represent a pretty big step backward in terms of doctor-patient interaction in the Emergency Dept. We're making progress but EHRs have a long way to go catch up to paper forms in this (important) way. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=47008 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
