While EHRs are increasingly essential for healthcare providers, their efficacy can be constricted by the nature of their design, their use and the interpretation of data.
January 28, 2010
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This is very sad fact. There are many other much more important things nurses should be taking care of, instead of spending most of their time on paperwork. There should be other professionals responsible for this. That is one of the reason why public health care and hospitals quality is on so low level...
V. Niani
Peyronie's disease treatment
I agree with the previous comments. I saw what was called an "intelligent graphical interface" or IGI over 10 years ago. It was very advanced yet it has not penetrated the legacy row and column interface. It seems that many current EMRs are not much more than electronic versions of paper charts that shuffle various parts of the record on and off the screen. Little attention is paid to the creation of linkages between different parts of the record. Little use is made of smart icons that could provide the user with some indication of the information that is connected to that icon. Sophisticated graphs that are available in other industries are virtually unknown in the EMR domain the excuse being that that no one is asking for them. Physicians themselves will often say that they would rather see the numbers rather than graphs. I suspect that this is because they have only seen poorly designed graphs and they have been taught in medical school to look at the numbers.