Many doctors believe that today’s EMRs are difficult to use and stand in the way of quality care at times, according to a new RAND Corporation research report covered by Healthcare IT News.
The RAND report comes from a project, sponsored by the American Medical Association, which was designed to identify what influences doctors’ professional satisfaction.
To research the report, RAND surveyed 30 physician practices in six states–Colorado, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Texas Washington and Wisconsin. RAND researchers also visited each of the practices on site, conducting in-depth interviews with 220 doctors, medical administrators and allied health professionals to see what drives doctors’ satisfaction with their work lives.
One key finding of the report was that being able to provide high-quality care is a primary factor in job satisfaction for physicians — and that anything which hinders them from doing so is a source of stress. And one critical factor that doctors feel impedes their ability to deliver good care is the requirement to use EMRs, Healthcare IT News notes.
Doctors who responded to the survey told RAND that current EMR technology gets in the way of face-to-face discussions with patients, demands that physicians spend too much time on clerical work and lowers the accuracy of medical records by encouraging the use of template-generated notes, according to Healthcare IT News.
What’s more, doctors told RAND that they’re unhappy that EMRs have been more costly than expected, and that the lack of interoperability between various EMRs has been a major frustration, as it keeps them from easily sending patient data where it’s needed and when it’s needed.
Medical practices are trying to reduce doctor frustration by hiring staffers to perform many tasks involved in maintaining electronic records. And practices are attempting to improve physician satisfaction in other ways, such as giving them more independence in structuring clinical activities and allowing more control over the pace and content of the care they provide.
Still, it’s telling that as many as one-fifth of practices might switch EMRs, searching for an system that solves problems rather than creating new ones. Whatever practices are doing to help physicians achieve satisfaction with their current EMR, it doesn’t seem to be working very well.
