technology

The RAND Corporation, which was commissioned by the American Medical Association to identify the factors that influence physicians' professional satisfaction, found that those physicians surveyed do not want to go back to paper charting. But they are reporting several issues with the deployment of electronic health records: "Among the key findings of the study was how electronic health records have affected physician professional satisfaction. Those surveyed expressed concern that current electronic health record technology interferes with face-to-face discussions with patients, requires physicians to spend too much time performing clerical work and degrades the accuracy of medical records by encouraging template-generated notes. In addition, doctors worry that the technology has been more costly than expected and different types of electronic health records are unable to 'talk' to each other, preventing the transmission of patient medical information when it is needed."

The Washington Post has a great explainer on why the exchanges for American consumers to buy health insurance policies are buggy and having problems since they opened. One issue: "the site needs to interact with a large number of databases operated by various federal and state agencies. If these back-end systems are poorly designed, it could take months or even years to straighten out the mess," The Post reports.

A physician-legislator opined this weekend in The Washington Post that a moratorium should be declared on rolling out electronic health records. One problem is "entry errors and inconsistencies are becoming common." Another problem is different institutions all have different systems. Another problem is doctors end up staring at computer screens, not listening to patients during visits. The columnist wants one national system.