Physician whose mother had heart surgery reflects on sane EHR use

The following from a physician I know, an ED physician, on the care their mother received at a major academic medical center's teaching hospital using EHR.

Emphases mine:

Mom just had aortic valve at hospital [name redacted] associated with [redacted] Medical School.  EHR used was [major EHR vendor name redacted] but it clearly had been pushed into the background......

1) Every ICU patient also had a printed chart in a notebook (paper) medical record book kept at the nursing station.  Just like the old days. It was the most commonly used source of info to the residents and staff.

2) Not once did I see an EHR physically come between a patient and a staff member (as opposed to nearly every encounter where I work).

3) Mom's (and every ICU patients) plan for the day was outlined in magic marker directly on the glass doors and windows and updated during rounds....available for immediate reference, not buried in an EHR.

4) Her clinical info was accurate....... it was dictated and not fabricated from pick lists or dot phrases.

5) Clerks put in the data and Dr's orders......apparently they long ago figured out the nonsense called CPOE and let the clerks do it.

I suspect many major University hospitals have worked around the workflow barriers and most egregious documentation sins.  The doctors there (at least in that Cardiothoracic ICU) have enough clout that they can just say HELL NO.  Those of us working for less astute/ non cutting edge community hospitals run by "also ran" healthcare corps are left to bear the crosses ONCHIT and the EHR industry have dumped upon us.

I am grateful to the folks at [hospital] for an excellent job on my mom and demonstrating that efficient healthcare pushes the EHR (as currently sold and configured) to the back burner.

Oh, [EHR name redacted] still is loaded with those prefilled templates and copy/ paste pull forward geared for upcoding.....but these "top of the food chain" docs just didn't waste their time with them.

Having had to gut and remediate really, really terrible health IT for invasive cardiology and cardiac surgery years ago (http://cci.drexel.edu/faculty/ssilverstein/cases/?loc=cases&sloc=Cardiology%20story), and revise workflows to relieve busy clinicians with critically-ill patients from the stupidity and time-sink of fiddling with balky computers with poorly-designed software, I identify with this physician's observations and beliefs.

As I've stated in previous posts, most clinicians need to be relieved of clerical tasks associated with computers, especially data entry and ordering, not just surgeons.

If the data is really that valuable, hiring clericals to do clerical work should remain a true bargain, with massive return on investment.

If that is not the case, then the data is really not that valuable.

-- SS