Via Business Insider and NY Times:
The advent of electronic medical records has been a boon to patient safety and physician efficiency in many ways. But it has also brought with it a slew of “timesaving” tricks that have had some unintended consequences. These tricks make it so easy for doctors to document the results of standard exams and conversations with patients that it appears more and more of them are being documented without ever having happened in the first place.
Points:
- “This fall, the attorney general and secretary of health and human services warned the five major hospital associations that this kind of abuse [e.g., one click to insert a completed physical exam in the patient’s record] would not be tolerated.”
- “A 2009 study found that 90 percent of physicians reported copying and pasting when writing daily notes.”
- “Doctors are paid not by how much time they spend with patients, how well they listen or how hard they think about what could be wrong, but by how much they write down. And the rules for what we have to write are Byzantine.”
- “…we should question whether paying physicians by documentation — instead of by time spent on quality patient care — is such a great idea after all.”
