Rebekah Gardner has to make a choice each time she sees a patient in her Rhode Island office: she can scroll computer screens and click boxes, or she can focus on the patient and take home the computer work.
“We’re either left fumbling through data entry with our patient in the exam room, missing out on an opportunity to truly connect, or we’re left with hours of documentation and computer work after a long day of seeing patients,” she said in a phone interview.
Dr Gardner, a professor at Brown University’s Alpert Medical School in Providence, Rhode Island, sought to understand how other physicians have adapted to the demand to enter data about patients into electronic health records.
EHRs were developed in response to federal government financial incentives aimed at facilitating the exchange of health information, reducing medical errors and improving care. But they can strain clinical encounters, note Gardner and colleagues in the June issue of the Journal of Innovation in Health Informatics.
Researchers asked doctors licensed to practice in Rhode Island the question: “How does using an EHR affect your interaction with patients?”
They got an earful.
Most who responded...
