Yes, I’m a geek. When my girls were in high school, their friends were amazed that they received texts from their mother. One daughter has commented on Facebook that her mother is more tech-savvy than she is. At the beginning of 2012 my interest in the healthcare benefits of social media was born and I began blogging.
Yes, I’m a geek. When my girls were in high school, their friends were amazed that they received texts from their mother. One daughter has commented on Facebook that her mother is more tech-savvy than she is. At the beginning of 2012 my interest in the healthcare benefits of social media was born and I began blogging. I investigated and use LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+ while remaining attentive to Pinterest, AboutMe, Doximity, Instagram and others. So when my employer offered me the position of EHR Physician Champion for our physician group a couple of months ago, I took on the challenge. And challenge is the operative word.
Presently there are about 25 physicians in our 180+ multi-specialty group “live” (using electronic records). In a meeting specifically called to discuss “Provider Go-Lives”, three individuals tasked with implementing EHR turned to me and said, “So Dr. Nieder, how can we encourage doctors who are not embracing EHR to do so.” Hmmm….good question.
Let me preface these remarks by stating that our administrators have tried everything in their well-researched knowledge base to make this transition work. As we move forward improvements are made with every new Go Live. My immediate response was two-fold:
- In training, don’t give physicians the impression that using an EHR is using a paper chart in electronic form. It is an entirely new way to document and, unfortunately, the learning curve resembles third year medical school with IT support instead of attendings. It is every bit as daunting.
- Encourage the doctors to shadow with someone already successfully using the system.
As a geek, the EHR experience has me torn between two emotions: incredulity at its lack of usability and that sinking sensation I remember from the late 80’s when the software rarely did what it was advertised to and crashed all too frequently, freezing the computer and forcing the user to restart both the software and often the entire system. The promise was there but the reality was long in coming. So too is today’s EHR.
