“The electronic medical record, the EMR, is upon us.
For those of us who learned medicine entirely with paper charts, some have enthusiastically embraced the EMR and some have refused, to the extent they can, to deal with it at all. But most of us have plowed ahead into learning how to use it as best we can. It seems to me that the degree of enthusiasm physicians show for the EMR relates less to the particular version of it we have chosen (or, more commonly, was chosen for us) than it does to the kind of medicine we practice. The old paper records worked reasonably well for all of us; in contrast, the several versions of the EMR I’ve used work very well for some kinds of doctors, but less well for other kinds. I think a good part of this disparity is that the basic purpose of the medical record has changed over the past half-century or so, and some of these new roles can conflict with the old ones.”
Article
Christopher Johnson, KevinMD, 17 November 2010
