HIV and ID Observations

September 19th, 2024

How Electronic Health Records Tyrannize Doctors — ID Doctors in Particular

A paper just appeared in the Journal of General Internal Medicine entitled “National Comparison of Ambulatory Physician Electronic Health Record Use Across Specialties.” The goal of the study was to track clinician workload by specialty, divided into various functions — documentation, chart review, orders, inbox. Importantly, there was no gaming the system. By using Epic’s built-in […]

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May 14th, 2017

Poll: Which Feature of Electronic Health Records is Most Important to Patient Care?

The first electronic medical record I used regularly — called “BICS” — initially had one purpose. It was a tool to look up a patient’s lab results. Simple, reliable, and blazingly fast, it did one thing remarkably well. Later, one of our Emergency Department doctors, who happens to have impressive coding skills, worked with a team to add a simple ambulatory medical […]

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April 30th, 2016

A Ridiculously Long Post: How EHRs Expose Unspoken Hierarchies Within Medicine — Or Maybe Are Just Bad

I am consulted by a surgeon about a patient with something that might be infectious, might not. A very appropriate referral. After seeing the patient and reviewing the history and scans, I decide a CT-guided biopsy is the next step. The nice radiology fellow tells me “Just place the order in [enter name of EHR here]”. Since this is the first time […]

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