I’ve never read anything by Joseph Stalin, but I gather he’d be much in demand for implementing EMR’s. From the management side, not the physicians.’
Dr. Cephus Allin’s presentation today, which referenced the late Soviet dictator, was titled How To Go From Paper To An EMR. It totally rocked; I wish I’d attended his other session, Why Everyone Needs An EMR. But that’s what happens when you have awesome content hidden behind modest titles.
Major take home points:
- shunt work more efficiently away from physicians onto support staff when possible
- less MD time/task = more patients scheduled/day
- abstracting the chart is much more important than scanning it
- limit the abstracting to absolutely necessary items (like problem list w/ICD-9’s, allergies, meds)
- limit the scanning to 10 pages per physician pass, and 3 passes, max, before bye-bye chart (ekg, last CPE, critical study reports/consults)
- when staff are limited and already multitasked-out, extend the go-live timeline, and adopt more incrementally and slowly
And that, indubitably, there are practices that just ain’t suited for EMR.