by
Brendon Nafziger, DOTmed News Associate Editor | March 16, 2010
"We planned for productivity to be lost. People would...be asked to do less when we started," he says.
And though it didn't take long for most doctors to get the hang of the system, he admits when they began they didn't like it. "[Learning the system] is not the same as being happy," he observes. What happened, he thinks, is that though it was easy for doctors to learn the basics, most didn't have a sense of "mastery" where they felt it was helping them perform faster or better.
"Regaining the sense of mastery takes longer, and it's not easily gained," he says.
"It's always something"
Another lesson is one that might not apply to other companies -- don't invent your own software.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Kaiser first began creating some electronic record-keeping systems from scratch, as there wasn't really anyone they could buy one from. "But we're not a software development organization," he says, which is why they now work with Epic - whom they regularly recommend new features to - instead of developing their own programs.
Ultimately, Dr. Wiesenthal thinks the most important lesson is that the purpose of having an electronic health record must not simply be to have an electronic health record.
"Putting it in is not the goal. Using the tool wisely to improve people's health is the goal," he says. This means, he argues, an EHR ought to be more than a "fancy typewriter" that helps make doctor's notes more legible. As an example, he mentions that an electronic health record could help more patients over 50 get screened for colon cancer. Instead of having doctors do something as time-consuming and laborious as flipping through patients' files to find those over 50 who haven't been screened yet, they could simply use the electronic record software to search for all patients in that age group who still need screening.
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