Forced Inefficiencies of the Electronic Health Record

Excerpt

The medical record has been a subject of science, and an object of intervention, for decades, but at times, it still seems that our progress misses the mark—not just someone else’s mark, but even our own. We want today’s electronic health record (EHR) systems to serve as efficient tools to document and even facilitate effective care of individual patients and populations. Although the EHR has transformed the medical record from simply a historical record into more of a “living document”—as writers can tag each other with specific questions or notes, or have referrals electronically sent from one point to another, for example—it has also continued to enable inconsistency and potentially undesirable variation in documentation and, sometimes, even the clinical care associated with it. …