They really are comically bad (Cerner, Epic, Meditech, all of them), but they are effective data silos which is a step up from having that data silo'ed in filing cabinets.
People outside healthcare really don't understand the sheer amount of time your physician spends trawling through the medical record in the regular course of doing his or her job. You can think of the patient chart as a shared "My Documents" folder on your computer. In modern multi-disciplinary care, you have many different parties taking care of the same patient and working in shifts. In order to get up to speed with what's happening for a particular patient, you need to open up each of the recent files in "My Documents" for that patient and review it. Lab results, progress notes, schedules, etc. Then repeat a couple dozen times for all the other patients you're caring for that day. Endless clicking. Constantly flipping between windows. Burn out.
That's not too much of an exaggeration of what the real EMR experience is like today.
These experiences also exacerbate the perception that I referred to before that can basically be summarized as "every previous attempt at making this better ended up being completely terrible". A whole slew of people want to improve things, but a lot of the time they don't take that responsibility seriously enough -- or know, fully, what that entails -- and when they bail that leaves the next would-be "disruptor" at a disadvantage.
Right, and it turns out that the devil you know is infinitely more attractive than the next helf finished buggy piece of shit that someone assures you will revolutionise your workflow.
My doctor's office just switched to the latest MyChart system and the app on Android has a pretty modern UX, decent usability and shows all my upcoming appointments, lab results, bill statements, etc. No complaints on my end, having access to my records right after my physician enters it into their computer is nice compared to requesting packets of physical paper then having to securely store them from prying eyes...
Mychart is really slick in my opinion. Very usable Android interface and everything you mentioned. I was definitely impreased for the patient experience. Sometimes with blood tests it can be a bit of information overload. But that is why you have a doctor explain what matters. It's also nice to see and compare previous tests to see things improve in a simple format.
People outside healthcare really don't understand the sheer amount of time your physician spends trawling through the medical record in the regular course of doing his or her job. You can think of the patient chart as a shared "My Documents" folder on your computer. In modern multi-disciplinary care, you have many different parties taking care of the same patient and working in shifts. In order to get up to speed with what's happening for a particular patient, you need to open up each of the recent files in "My Documents" for that patient and review it. Lab results, progress notes, schedules, etc. Then repeat a couple dozen times for all the other patients you're caring for that day. Endless clicking. Constantly flipping between windows. Burn out.
That's not too much of an exaggeration of what the real EMR experience is like today.