A Cautionary Tale

"Do you know what the most important work done in a hospital is?” asked Babs, the head of human resources at Heimlich Hospital.

“Healing sick people?” one of the children asks innocently. 

 “You’re wrong,” Babs growls, silencing the children. “The most important thing we do at the hospital,” she continues without flinching, “is paperwork.”

For those of us that deal on a daily basis with patient medical records, this cautionary tale rings all too true.  Doesn’t it seem sometimes that the process of documenting patient care has become more important than the care itself?

As healthcare IT experts, it is our job to create software and services that make it easier for hospitals and physicians to create, finalize and exchange patient records with each other.  And yet many of the most popular EMR “solutions” today do just the opposite.  They force doctors to change how they practice medicine to conform to the needs of the software, when it should be the other way around.

The most egregious example of this is asking doctors to point and click their way through a patient note.  The only reason for doing this is to make it easy for the EMR vendor to create a database of clinical data.  It doesn’t help the doctor in any way, and it certainly doesn’t promote communication with the patient.

Shouldn’t the EMR be working for the doctor, instead of the doctor working  for the EMR?

That is exactly the question our product development team seeks to solve every day.  We are passionate about finding ways for technology to help reduce the amount of time doctors and their support staff spend on paperwork.

That is why we are building an easy-to-use EMR based on dictation and narrative notes, so that doctors can use a documentation process that is easy and familiar to them.  Behind the scenes, we use advanced technology to tag discrete data, creating a structured narrative note that provides the same database functionalilty, but without all the pointing and clicking.

The most important thing we do at our “hospital” is let doctors be doctors.