Electronic health records: We need to find needles, not stack more hay

FINDING THE NEEDLE, NOT STORING MORE HAY

Beyond poor design, another problem with current EHR systems is that they overload us with information, so that our time is spent sifting through data rather than synthesizing it. We are seeing an unprecedented proliferation of both clinical data in the EHR and supporting research data. This combination has not helped the physician find the “needle.” Rather, it has managed to just store more hay.

All health care providers need to know how to read a chart quickly and efficiently to ascertain the story. In medical school, we teach new doctors about what makes for a good consult: synthesize the data and ask for an opinion. While a first-year medical school student would say, “I need a GI consult: the hemoglobin is 6, platelets are low, and there is blood in the stool,” a resident would say, “I need a GI consult for upper endoscopy, as I suspect this patient has alcoholic cirrhosis and likely portal hypertension: I am worried about variceal bleeding.” We should expect the same from our EHR.

Our relationship with health technology needs to shift. We need not view the EHR merely as a record, as something to physically hold data, but rather as a system that digests data to produce knowledge. The EHR needs to be viewed as a mentor and a colleague, a place that not only records data, but that also ascertains data incongruities, displays information that is relevant, and gives providers rapid, at-a-glance knowledge of the patient’s condition. The silo Dr. Stoller describes is not just the physical separation of providers, it is also the separation of providers and knowledge. We are still hunters and gatherers of information. Let the EHR work for the clinician. Tell me that I have not addressed my patient’s hyperkalemia. Tell me that my gastroenterology consultant is online and has just completed a consult note. Tell me that my patient is having uncontrolled pain now, rather than my having to discover this 9 hours later. We should expect our EHR to deliver the right information to the right person at the right time in the right format. The electronic health colleague might be a more apt term.

MAKING THE EHR WORK FOR US

So, has the EHR destroyed clinician collaboration? Certainly not. It has just changed the environment and the way we interact with the medical system. In fact, I argue that it could actually make it better, if we shift our expectations of our EHR systems. The future state of collaboration may not be in the traditional form of speaking to a colleague next to you, but rather in having a system that supports real-time access and sharing of digested knowledge about the patient. This knowledge can then be shared with other providers, finance systems, national health exchanges, predictive models, and even the patient, breaking the silos.

Someday the EHR might give back time to the provider, and we might say, “I just finished my patient panel early—let’s go get a cup of coffee and catch up.”