I’ve finally found my groove with our EMR. Maybe I’m even starting to like it.
A few weeks ago I got a new iPad, this time a Mini, which lets me type with two thumbs the way some people text on a smartphone, and the voice transcription is good enough as long as you avoid fancy jargon and unusual generic drug names. Yesterday as I sat next to a patient and …
See what happens when you give a doctor a user-friendly EMR?
The health care AI space is frothy. Billions in venture capital are flowing, nearly every writer on the health care beat has at least an article or two on the topic, and there isn’t a medical conference that doesn’t at least have a panel if not a dedicated day to discuss. The promise and potential is very real.
And yet, we seem to be blowing it.
The latest example is an investigation …
7 ways we are screwing up AI in health care
Rates of physician burnout are rising, and many physicians cite their electronic health record (EHR) as the primary culprit. That’s no surprise, since doctors spend twice as much time on electronic health record (EHR) systems and deskwork as they do directly interacting with patients. Let that sink in for a moment. Imagine if an airline pilot spent six hours documenting every detail of a three-hour flight. Such …
How tech can get doctors back to seeing patients
An app to diagnose melanoma, it sounds convenient and less expensive than going to the dermatologist. But what if you were told that the app had an error rate of 30 percent, would you still take the risk? The advent of digital media has broken physicians’ monopoly on health information, and this freedom comes at a price. Misinformation isn’t just a political issue, but a problem with …
We live in an epidemic of health misinformation. Can mobile apps help?
Tele-empathy is not being empathetic over the phone. It is not crying in the sad parts of your favorite TV show. It is not beaming empathetic thoughts magically across time and space. No, tele-empathy is a technology. I should rather say, it’s a group of technologies recently being created to increase the empathy of health care providers. “This is rich,” you might say coming from an industry that brought us …
New technology might help us become more empathetic to others’ suffering
In days of yore, people in distress usually turned to family, friends and occasionally the clergy for help but for many years now, much of the burden of dealing with human misery has been transferred to medical professionals. Going forward and given that the iPhone and social media are ubiquitous in the daily lives of most of us, it is probably no surprise that the latest psychological support system comes …
An exchange between former Vice-President Joe Biden and EPIC CEO Judy Faulkner at a Biden Cancer Initiative event has again elevated the discussion of patient access to their medical records.
You can read the discussion on Politico. However, Biden’s main point was that patients needn’t justify their claim to their own EHR records.
In fairness to Ms. Faulkner, they did express a common view: medical records are too complex for …
Patient first: How EHRs can better serve our shared mission
How does the EHR drive burnout? Let’s count the ways. By understanding this, we can develop countermeasures to lower the impact and reduce the risk of physician burnout.
We’ve all seen the studies that show that for every hour we spend with a patient, we spend two hours on administrative work, and we take hours of work home with us each night. But as we’ll see, it’s not all just about …
How does the EHR drive burnout? Let’s count the ways.
Electronic health records (EHR) have been used for several years. It is the form that physicians use to login sensitive information about their patient. Security and confidentiality of such delicate, valued protected health information (PHI) has historically been a concern, and rightfully so.
Over the course of a few years, hacking on broad scales have been common occurrence and PHI is considered a high priority target by such malicious actions.
An answer …
It’s time to consider blockchain technology for EHRs
As many of you know, much of my focus has been on how we can improve health care information technology, and build on the systems that we currently have to make them more user-friendly and less cumbersome. At the crux of the problem is the issue of the disproportionate amount of time they take to navigate and how they turn the noble and personable art of being a doctor, into …
3 ways health IT impedes communication
An article in Newsweek magazine says, “Artificial intelligence will cure America’s sick health care system” using data and automation to “drive down the costs of health care while increasing effectiveness.”
According to Newsweek, it will work like this for diabetes. A company called Virta Health has come up with a smartphone app that is like “a live-in doctor and diabetes coach.” Type 2 diabetics who enroll will enter data such as blood sugar …
Artificial intelligence in health care: Better studies are needed
Mr. X. is a man in his 80s who was cured of his cancer. The question remains: at what cost?
The biologic therapy and radiation which eradicated the cancer left him with the inability to swallow and need for permanent PEG tube. Due to overall frailty and multiple comorbidities, he never graduated from the SNF and continues to reside there today.
I inherited his care after he completed his definitive treatment in …
Is there an EMR checkbox for a renewed spirit?
I have wanted to be a pediatrician since I was eight years old. Growing up, my favorite book was the large medical encyclopedia that sat on the bookshelf in our den. My life has been planned around that singular goal, each step predetermined and in a very specific order. I have thoroughly enjoyed practicing medicine over the last 17 years — first as a primary care pediatrician, then for the …
I left medicine to become an entrepreneur
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Alan Rickman, Carrie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds, and George Michael. In just this past year, we have lost these four, and millions more, to chronic diseases. The CDC states chronic diseases like heart disease, stroke, and cancer are the leading causes of death and disability in the U.S. All of our lives have been affected by one, if not many, of these illnesses.
As health care professionals, we counsel patients to eat …
The demand for innovative patient follow-up
“Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.”
– Sir William Osler
Two people presented to my clinic on the same day with classic symptoms of head and neck cancer.
Each reported several weeks of unilateral throat discomfort, ear pain, and a neck mass. Each was having some trouble swallowing and had changed his diet to accommodate the soreness. When they opened their mouths, each had a mass with a …
Artificial intelligence in medicine is still a long ways off
Earlier this week, as I write this, our office lost a skirmish against technology.
It was my procedure day, where lucky patients file in awaiting the pleasures of scope examinations of their alimentary canals. A few will swallow the scope (under anesthesia), but most will have back-end work done. We are a small private practice equipped with an outstanding staff. We do our best every day to provide them with the …
When your doctor’s computer crashes
Following my latest article on health care information technology, and how tragic the situation has become for physicians, I received a lot of correspondence. As always with articles that express physicians’ frustrations with the current batch of IT systems, there’s typically a lot of sympathy and agreement (although I believe that just nodding our heads and saying how bad a situation is, doesn’t really mean that …
5 ways to fix health IT immediately
Computers, more specifically, electronic health records (EHRs), will someday revolutionize the practice of medicine. In fact, successful computerization of medical care is the most critical step necessary to transform the American health care system from its current sorry state to the 21st-century system of our dreams. It is ironic, then, that today EHRs represent one of the worst problems plaguing medical professionals. At this point, many physicians would say that …
How to fix the EHR mess we’re in
With the Department of Justice announcement of the $155 million dollar eClinicalWorks settlement (including personal liability for the CEO, CMO and COO), many stakeholders are wondering what’s next for EHRs.
Clearly, the industry is in a state of transition. eCW will be distracted by its 5-year corporate integrity agreement. Â Â AthenaHealth will have to focus on the activist investors at Elliott …
The future of EHR: Here are 5 predictions
I’ve spent a lot of time writing about the suboptimal nature of electronic medical records and what we need to be doing better.
At their best, health care information technology systems can make finding patient medical data unbelievably quick and easy. However, at their worst, they take up an unacceptable amount of physicians’ time and also dumb down medicine, reducing our patients’ stories to rows of meaningless tick …
Why health IT is such a tragedy
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