

Little Benefit Seen, So Far, in Electronic Patient Records - edw519
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/business/16records.html?_r=1&hpw

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manvsmachine
This is not an improvement that we will see in the matter of months, or
probably even a few years. I suspect that we'll see _very_ marginal
incremental improvements, followed by a large spike in productivity /
efficiency. It would make sense that EMR's, like the Internet, and PC's before
it, will be adopted collectively as a generation.

I've personally been involved in a reasonably large deployment of a high-
profile EMR system. In my case, we're talking about introducing networked
software systems to _an entire workforce_. Doctors. Nurses. Residents.
Receptionists. These aren't even people in the corporate business world, where
computer / internet skills are considered vital skills. We're talking about
starting from the ground up, "This is how you log into your computer". Even
once they've been trained, it's not the same as having staff full of tech-
savvy employees, who intuitively know how they can make software work for
them.

EMR's have a long way to go as well. many of the packages out pretty much just
duplicate the functionality of paper records as pages of forms. The only
difference is that the info is displayed it on a screen. Additionally,
Presumably in an attempt to lock up a young market, there doesn't seem to be a
lot of horizontal integration going on yet. This too will change, I think, as
the market demands more as they become more widely adopted.

On a side note, you have _no_ idea how old-school many med-school programs
are. I was really surprised at how much technical innovation there is in the
engineering of medical devices, but not in medical practice.

