Upgrading the Electronic Medical Record!

After 30 years or so, there is still much joy for me in the practice of medicine. Electronic medical record (EMR) systems doesn’t make the list. Chances are that if you asked your own doctor to assemble a Frustration List, that EMR issues would be among the top five entries. Over the past 15 or 20 years, I have struggled through several of them. At one point, I was using 4 distinct systems: 2 different hospital EMR systems, our office practice EMR and our endoscopy center’s software. Does this sound like fun? Think of all the passwords I kept track of!

There is a recurrent EMR event in every system that brings doctors to our knees. Here’s the simple phrase that transforms even a stoic doctor into a sweating and trembling practitioner:

The EMR system will be upgraded overnight.

Let me explain. One might think that a computer upgrade would be a desirable event. For example, Merriam-Webster’s dictionary definition of upgrade is to replace something with a more useful version or alternative. What actually happens is that the system that you have clumsily managed to operate, once upgraded, now seems to have more bugs crawling through it than an ant colony. The computer tasks that you formerly performed with practiced mediocrity no longer seem to work. Glitches pop up everywhere. Frozen screens. Lost data. (well, it’s not really lost; it’s just now nestled in some deep EMR layer that you don’t even know exists!).

Now, as you might expect, these upgrades elevate staff morale and create a peaceful aura that bathes the entire office.

Depiction of Doctor Whose EMR was just Upgraded.

And physicians, known for our patience, are completely understanding when our IT technical support team advises us that they will try to amend the situation in a day or so.

In my current job, I do confess that the EMR system called EPIC is the easiest of all of the prior systems that I’ve endured. Thus far, it has never crashed and burned, and it operates more intuitively than other competitors. I have achieved my goal of learning only those skills that I truly need. I am content to soar at a low cruising altitude. But, on a regular basis the system is upgraded. This is when I can learn a bunch of new ways to do stuff even when the old ways worked fine.

Have computers introduced absurdity into your life? Kindly share.

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