A relative of mine had to go back to their paper-only specialist a couple of months ago to get a prescription reissued because the specialist had omitted a mandatory detail from the (handwritten) prescription form and the pharmacist couldn't fill it.
Meanwhile, I had a similar prescription, from a different specialist, who issues his prescriptions as either e-scripts or computer-generated paper scripts depending on patient preference. I suspect his practice management software would stop him from making this class of mistake entirely.
I get why a doctor might prefer to avoid the computer, but I think my relative would have preferred their doctor not screwing up on something basic and wasting a significant amount of their time over better vibes in a consult.
Ive had so many problems woth e prescribe. Half the time its "just not working right now" the other half they send to the wrong place, or they send to a pharmacy that doesnt have supply and you cant find out that theyre out of stock until they recieve the script. At which point you have to cancel and then contact your doctor to resend. Which can take several days. Whereas with paper prescriptions you just drive to the next pharmamcy.
Why would that necessarily be the case? I understand that bad software can get in the way of anything, but I find it hard to imagine there is nothing out there that actually helps any given (and willing) physician to improve their work, and make more time for patients, not less. There are inherent properties to IT that can help make stuff more efficient across any domain I can think of, and physicians work checks a lot of the marks.
I happen to work in the medical field and while a lot of the software involved has its issues, not working with software, at this point, seems like a really bad idea, in terms of error prevention, performance and efficiency.
I'm a physician. To understand why this is true you have to understand that the software is not intended to the make the physicians jobs easier or more efficient. The point of modern EMR's is to take every patient encounter and generate a list of billable codes that maps onto the encounter in such a way that insurance companies are less likely to send it back. The stuff like checking medication interactions is just tacked on as an afterthought. Through this lens everything else makes more sense.
Paper-shuffling used to be not a major issue in a doctor's work day. It was merely something that yes, sure you had to log new patient data and whatnot for reference, but you were mostly free to do the paperwork in a way that fit your natural workflow. Based on the doctors I know/knew, it was not a pain point. Yeah, you would sometimes have to fetch physical papers from somewhere instead of clicking yourself to the same information on the computer, but that was not a major issue. I'd say it was similar to a programmer who's waiting for an incremental compilation to finish: a minor moment out of actual work but nothing to fret about.
After doctors' offices got digital then interacting with the computer specifically certainly became an issue which didn't exist before. At best, it was just a clumsy way to do the inevitable and at worst it became a major part of the patient visit, with myriad of odd tricks you had to learn about some particular computer software in order to accomplish your actual goals.
If something that used to be normal part of work nobody thought twice about once become noted as a separate issue of the work day, something did change there. Sure, there are benefits too, but it's the friction points that you feel at work when you're trying to get other things done. Sure, software could be written to serve the user and not the other way around, but software rarely is -- no matter the profession, doctors aren't the only ones!
My old family doctor used to have IBM terminals into the early 2010s, I'm fairly sure there was an AS/400 somewhere in the back rooms where all the serial lines in their practice converged. Very fast system. Meanwhile I was at a specialist some time ago and they had to switch back and forth between notepad and the medical app, because you can't enter more than a few words at once into the app. So he would write everything that's not a drop-down in notepad then copy-paste it.
Well for one thing it's much less likely for someone to steal 36000 therapy files and extort people into suicide when they're stored decentrally on paper in locked cabinets instead of ~~the cloud~~.
It’s not how the records are kept per se.
It’s that the paper-using doctor can spend more time on you, the patient, instead of fighting with a balky UI and inane business rules.
A relative of mine had to go back to their paper-only specialist a couple of months ago to get a prescription reissued because the specialist had omitted a mandatory detail from the (handwritten) prescription form and the pharmacist couldn't fill it.
Meanwhile, I had a similar prescription, from a different specialist, who issues his prescriptions as either e-scripts or computer-generated paper scripts depending on patient preference. I suspect his practice management software would stop him from making this class of mistake entirely.
I get why a doctor might prefer to avoid the computer, but I think my relative would have preferred their doctor not screwing up on something basic and wasting a significant amount of their time over better vibes in a consult.
Ive had so many problems woth e prescribe. Half the time its "just not working right now" the other half they send to the wrong place, or they send to a pharmacy that doesnt have supply and you cant find out that theyre out of stock until they recieve the script. At which point you have to cancel and then contact your doctor to resend. Which can take several days. Whereas with paper prescriptions you just drive to the next pharmamcy.
Theres pros and cons to both
Why would that necessarily be the case? I understand that bad software can get in the way of anything, but I find it hard to imagine there is nothing out there that actually helps any given (and willing) physician to improve their work, and make more time for patients, not less. There are inherent properties to IT that can help make stuff more efficient across any domain I can think of, and physicians work checks a lot of the marks.
I happen to work in the medical field and while a lot of the software involved has its issues, not working with software, at this point, seems like a really bad idea, in terms of error prevention, performance and efficiency.
I'm a physician. To understand why this is true you have to understand that the software is not intended to the make the physicians jobs easier or more efficient. The point of modern EMR's is to take every patient encounter and generate a list of billable codes that maps onto the encounter in such a way that insurance companies are less likely to send it back. The stuff like checking medication interactions is just tacked on as an afterthought. Through this lens everything else makes more sense.
Not necessarily, no, but empirically yes.
Paper-shuffling used to be not a major issue in a doctor's work day. It was merely something that yes, sure you had to log new patient data and whatnot for reference, but you were mostly free to do the paperwork in a way that fit your natural workflow. Based on the doctors I know/knew, it was not a pain point. Yeah, you would sometimes have to fetch physical papers from somewhere instead of clicking yourself to the same information on the computer, but that was not a major issue. I'd say it was similar to a programmer who's waiting for an incremental compilation to finish: a minor moment out of actual work but nothing to fret about.
After doctors' offices got digital then interacting with the computer specifically certainly became an issue which didn't exist before. At best, it was just a clumsy way to do the inevitable and at worst it became a major part of the patient visit, with myriad of odd tricks you had to learn about some particular computer software in order to accomplish your actual goals.
If something that used to be normal part of work nobody thought twice about once become noted as a separate issue of the work day, something did change there. Sure, there are benefits too, but it's the friction points that you feel at work when you're trying to get other things done. Sure, software could be written to serve the user and not the other way around, but software rarely is -- no matter the profession, doctors aren't the only ones!
My old family doctor used to have IBM terminals into the early 2010s, I'm fairly sure there was an AS/400 somewhere in the back rooms where all the serial lines in their practice converged. Very fast system. Meanwhile I was at a specialist some time ago and they had to switch back and forth between notepad and the medical app, because you can't enter more than a few words at once into the app. So he would write everything that's not a drop-down in notepad then copy-paste it.
Well for one thing it's much less likely for someone to steal 36000 therapy files and extort people into suicide when they're stored decentrally on paper in locked cabinets instead of ~~the cloud~~.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vastaamo_data_breach