When administrators and vendors start blocking access to parts of the chart, or letting patients pick and choose which tests or visits can be hidden, the doctor-patient relationship erodes. We retreat further into a box, as specialized providers, and patients come to expect less from us.
What Critical Data Could Your EHR Be Hiding?
Privacy advocates are pushing electronic record vendors to create a new class of protected health information. This sequestration of data could hide critical information from EPs and even erode the practice of emergency medicine.
Source: epmonthly.com
…when you log in to your EHR and click a chart, you’re leaving digital fingerprints, and your access to various parts of the chart is timestamped. While these features may be helpful to protect patient privacy and ensure best practices, they’ve also found their way into malpractice cases.
The promise and peril of metadata
Logging every action a physician takes on an electronic health record has legal risks, but also the potential benefit. At the very least, metadata can tell us about how we practice.
Source: epmonthly.com
Healthcare is definitely an industry that needs the simplification, and improved user experience, that Google typically provides.
That such a powerful company decided this goal was too difficult, or not worth the effort, is discouraging.
Google Health Post-Mortem: Where Did We Go Wrong?
A look at the nearly-late, nearly-great Google Health, and the prospects for personal health records.
Source: epmonthly.com
Where were the satisfaction surveys? Time-on-task reports? Click counts?
But by focusing on measuring errors, both trials anticipated something that I hadn’t: error measurement and prevention is the standard by which usability will be defined.
When I first got into electronic medical record usability, I thought it’d be about physician satisfaction, consistency, and counting clicks for key tasks. Recent developments suggest, however, it’s going to be about estimating and reducing errors.
Source: epmonthly.com
…another tech revolution is taking place in health care – the way patients interact with each other, and with health organizations, using social media.
How social media can change the public face of emergency medicine.
Source: epmonthly.com
The clear lesson here is that computerized physician order entry, and usability decisions, can impact patient care in unpredictable ways.
EHR drug-drug interaction warnings may ultimately save lives, but does the collateral damage of “alert fatigue” negate the benefit?
Source: epmonthly.com
The pace of change is accelerating because we spent ten or fifteen years dithering about the evidence and the best way to proceed. And now these changes are being foisted upon us because not enough of us were proactive.
I don’t know any other industry that has been as resistant to technology…
A freewheeling discussion on electronic medical records, conducted by Mark Plaster and featuring Rick Bukata, Bruce Janiak, and yours truly.

Source: epmonthly.com
The leadership in government, the regulatory agencies, wisely chose a mixture of structural and clinical process measures in this first stage to make sure those of us at the bedside, those of us clinically engaged, actually use the tool — not just merely install it.
Meaningful Use: “A Kick in the Pants”
My interview with Maimonides CMIO (and emergency physician) Steven Davidson
Source: epmonthly.com
It’s difficult to predict what kind of effect collecting and publicizing these numbers will have on ED boarding and crowding.
The Wired Department: M.U. and You
A primer on meaningful use of electronic health records, and what it will mean for emergency medicine.
Source: epmonthly.com
