The HITECH Act of 2009 created the EHR revolution in healthcare.
While the benefits of EHR have been laid out in the Act, actual implementations at health centers are beset with EHR problems.
These are very early stages in digitizing healthcare. Arguably the biggest driver has been the potential benefit for cost savings in healthcare. Improving care of patients and reducing medical errors, among others, will surely be other realizable benefits.
Like any new technology, solving problems begins with small steps. In the massive healthcare industry, the first step has been gathering the data. With the EHR revolution, hospitals moved to electronic data from records written on charts. This made the data more manageable, easier to read, easier to search and created a more standardized nomenclature among physicians and nurses.
As an example, “hypokalemia” is now only “hypokalemia.” Previously it could be “low K,” “hypokalemia,” a “K” with an arrow pointed down, etc.
This confusing nomenclature caused errors in billing and capturing patient conditions. Similarly, overly burdensome EHR inputs demanded that physicians create errors in the record to manage patients in a timely manner.
Doctors just “click to get through it” because the primary concern is the care of the patient in the limited time. When treating a patient, The doctor must listen, record and evaluate at the same time. Imagine a judge listening, doing the stenographers recordings and being the jury, evaluating all in a limited time. Thus the doctor’s primary concern, the care of the patient’s present illness, demands that he/she just “click to get through it.”
This mentality of moving quickly so “I can get to patient care without too much wasted time” means that the data entered into EHRs is not clean and not correct most of the time.
In addition, the government ramped up the detail necessary for correct coding and billing to be paid. This added more granularity for the clinicians to quickly click through. The result was more bad data.
Increasingly, a number of physicians are accompanied by scribes that deal with recording inputs to the EHRs, even as the physician tries to maximize patient face-time. Another cost addition to healthcare. Another chance to mis-interprete and enter incorrect data.
Consequently, incorrect data is creeping into the EHRs on a daily basis!
Incorrect data leads to incorrect insights.
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