On 6/15/05, steven mcphelan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Ken, since you are in med school, I would recommend that you take whatever > anyone says about any EHR with a grain of salt. You should investigate > yourself the pros and cons. I am always suspicious of any physician that > makes the comment about being a data-entry clerk. A physician job is to > provide the best medical care possible for their patients. Many studies > have shown that overall patient care can significantly be improved if CPOE > (computer physician order entry) is implemented. But that means that > physician is now a "data entry clerk".
I've been exceeding my daily sodium allowance for a while now, thanks. I certainly want to spend time investigating the various alternatives out there for myself, but in defense of some of these physicians, I feel compelled to mention that many of them have been happily using other EHR/EMR systems and doing computerized order entry (among MANY other things--order entry is generally among the least of a physician's documentation tasks) without similar complaint. This begs the question of why their experiences with VistA should be less pleasant. My off-the-cuff guesses (not having compared things for myself, yet) is that many commercial systems might be more tightly integrated and thus better at propagating data from one part of the EHR to another. (For example, no working physician wants to have to take the time to re-enter any demographic info; that should already be there, along with vitals, meds, etc. The commercial systems may be offering better shortcuts with more intelligent defaults. Incorporation of Dragon Naturally Speaking 8 probably helps a lot, as do macros and well-designed interfaces that minimize the amount of screen-switching and other effort needed to do common tasks. As an example of one type of brokenness that I've seen elsewhere, if a physician ever needs to re-enter a patient ID to browse to a different part of the record (e.g. to go look at current lab data or check the latest radiology reports which might be stored elsewhere), then something can be said to be wrong with the user interface. All that said, I admit that I'm talking without a lot of specific data to back me up here. I'll try to solicit some more impressions and concrete examples of problems that people have had with VistA in the past. Ken Stone ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: Discover Easy Linux Migration Strategies from IBM. Find simple to follow Roadmaps, straightforward articles, informative Webcasts and more! Get everything you need to get up to speed, fast. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_idt77&alloc_id492&op=click _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list Hardhats-members@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members
