Why Doctors Don't Like EMR's

Mr HISTalk is on the money in his latest blog

Doctors, like 99% of people, want to be consumers of information, not creators of it

Doctors want to give great care - that's a universal maxim for the profession and anything that enables or facilitates this will be successful and will get used. But that's not what has been going on:

The model of forcing doctors to share their thoughts through manual electronic documentation is fatally flawed. There is no industry … none … where someone with the education and time value of a physician is expected to peck on a computer, especially in front of a client who’s only going to get seven minutes of time (I’ve never seen a CIO typing meeting minutes into a PC, yet they’re often the ones beefing about computer-avoiding doctors).

and my personal favorite part of this piece - philosophic johad:

....trying to force those small business owners to use computers based on some kind of naive philosophic jihad against the inefficiency of paper-based recordkeeping

He is right "speech recognition" (or better yet the newer and more relevant speech understanding) is ready for prime time.....

Gathering the data should not be the focus - it should be a natural by product of the interaction and speech can help in achieving this. The real value comes with driving clinical information to support to decision making allowing clinicians to focus on the healthcare process