Electronic Health Record Adoption - Maybe It's Not About the Money: Physician Super-Users, Electronic Health Records and Patient Care

Overview

Journal Appl Clin Inform

Publisher Thieme

Specialties Health Services
Medical Informatics

Date 2013 Apr 26

PMID 23616888

Citations 23

Authors

L Grabenbauer

A Skinner

J Windle

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Objective: The slow adoption of electronic health record (EHR) systems has been linked to physician resistance to change and the expense of EHR adoption. This qualitative study was conducted to evaluate benefits, and clarify limitations of two mature, robust, comprehensive EHR Systems by tech-savvy physicians where resistance and expense are not at issue.

Methods: Two EHR systems were examined - the paperless VistA / Computerized Patient Record System used at the Veterans' Administration, and the General Electric Centricity Enterprise system used at an academic medical center. A series of interviews was conducted with 20 EHR-savvy multiinstitutional internal medicine (IM) faculty and house staff. Grounded theory was used to analyze the transcribed data and build themes. The relevance and importance of themes were constructed by examining their frequency, convergence, and intensity.

Results: Despite eliminating resistance to both adoption and technology as drivers of acceptance, these two robust EHR's are still viewed as having an adverse impact on two aspects of patient care, physician workflow and team communication. Both EHR's had perceived strengths but also significant limitations and neither were able to satisfactorily address all of the physicians' needs.

Conclusion: Difficulties related to physician acceptance reflect real concerns about EHR impact on patient care. Physicians are optimistic about the future benefits of EHR systems, but are frustrated with the non-intuitive interfaces and cumbersome data searches of existing EHRs.

Citing Articles

Electronic Health Record Adoption and Its Effects on Healthcare Staff: A Qualitative Study of Well-Being and Workplace Stress.

Provenzano M, Cillara N, Curcio F, Pisu M, Gonzalez C, Jimenez-Herrera M Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2024; 21(11).

PMID: 39595697 PMC: 11594038. DOI: 10.3390/ijerph21111430.

Electronic medical record implementation in the emergency department in a low-resource country: Lessons learned.

Faris N, Saliba M, Tamim H, Jabbour R, Fakih A, Sadek Z PLoS One. 2024; 19(3):e0298027.

PMID: 38427653 PMC: 10906867. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0298027.

Use of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) in Gerontology: Benefits, Considerations and a Promising Future.

Bednorz A, Mak J, Jylhava J, Religa D Clin Interv Aging. 2023; 18:2171-2183.

PMID: 38152074 PMC: 10752027. DOI: 10.2147/CIA.S400887.

Evaluating the Impact on Clinical Task Efficiency of a Natural Language Processing Algorithm for Searching Medical Documents: Prospective Crossover Study.

Park E, Watson H, Mehendale F, ONeil A JMIR Med Inform. 2022; 10(10):e39616.

PMID: 36287591 PMC: 9647457. DOI: 10.2196/39616.

Acute vital signs changes are underrepresented by a conventional electronic health record when compared with automatically acquired data in a single-center tertiary pediatric cardiac intensive care unit.

Lowry A, Futterman C, Gazit A J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2022; 29(7):1183-1190.

PMID: 35301538 PMC: 9196691. DOI: 10.1093/jamia/ocac033.

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