Ebola and electronic medical records

But implementation has been a costly fiasco. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on poorly designed, time-consuming systems. Physicians and nurses struggle to use them and are actually seeing fewer patients. Patients complain that physicians are so busy entering data onto computers that they barely look up. Nurses spend hours entering information rather than verbally communicating important information to physicians and other nurses. EMRs also encourage providers to cut and paste extra information into their notes in the belief that more comprehensive notes are better (the billing for longer notes is also more remunerative). It would be bad enough if the practice merely resulted in higher costs, but it also hinders medical practice. Practitioners now have to search bloated documents filled with outdated or copied text in order to find relevant information. Inevitably, important details get overlooked.

A recent survey of more than 1,000 internists providing ambulatory care by the American College of Physicians found a statistically significant average loss of 48 minutes per clinic day (the equivalent of 4 hours per five-day week) due to EMRs. A third of respondents reported that it took longer to find and review medical-record data with an EMR than without. A similar percentage reported that it was harder to read other physicians’ notes in the EMR than it was to read them in the traditional written format. This echoes similar findings in a study of family physicians providing ambulatory care and an earlier study of non-federally funded, community office-based physician practices throughout the U.S. showing that EMRs were not associated with better-quality ambulatory care.