One of the best-kept secrets in medicine is how often those of us working in the field have utterly shocking, OMG moments. Our days look far more exciting on Grey’s Anatomy than they are in real life. Real life is a lot more like the first season of Scrubs. The OMGs come fast and loose, and sometimes they are particularly big, such as when Medicare cut reimbursements to physicians or incentivised EMR adoption.
Yeah, I said it, the recent ONC decision to promote EMR adoption sent gasps and shudders through medical communities throughout the country. Who didn’t read an article citing a physician wrestling with the conundrum of less money to support his business and the hulking expense of taking on new tech?
The big secret, the one conveyed in meaningful looks when the topic comes up, is that hardly anyone in medicine is particularly adept at using technology. Cutting edge, in the medical sector, is an Internet Explorer upgrade. If you say Linux in a room full of medical professionals, someone might say gesundheit.”
Statistical outliers exist, those physicians who love new gadgets and know how to use them. But most of the physician population in the United States is 50+ years old, started their profession at 35 with 400K in education debt and a family. They are working hard and when they have time they focus on patient-related education, not new devices or methods of conducting business.
To compound this, most physicians, and hospitals, get terrible advice from their EHR vendors. Vendors, in turn, charge ridiculous prices for terrible products. It’s not even a farce, it’s more of a tragedy. Most blogs don’t address the canyon between the needs of physicians and the interests of product developers.
My posts on EHRBloggers.com will focus on the reverberations in individual offices and medical communities induced by new technology. I’ll interview physicians, hospital administrators, and anyone else with a vested interest in the adoption of technology within the medical community.
As Dr. Joel Nobel said, “the purpose of medicine is to prevent significant disease, to decrease pain, and to postpone death…technology has to support these goals – if not, it may even be counterproductive.”
— Camille Williams
