Regardless......one needs to sprinkle a little "systems thinking" into this.... without a well integrated EHR you have no basis for a system wide quality improvement feed back loop....in assessing the value of automation benefits should not just be measured at a discrete point in time or part of the "value chain" of care.
I am surprised that health informatics academics are not descending upon the VA in droves...or maybe they are....
Joseph
Daniel L. Johnson wrote:
On Fri, 2005-05-06 at 04:15, J. Antas wrote:
A study published at the Acta Anaesthesiol Scand. (2005 Jan;49(1):62-5.) documents what seems to be an emerging (and rather unexpected) trend: Clinical IT (HIS) systems increase the time that healthcare workers spend documenting their activities and not the other way around.
With paper records, the nurses in my institution may spend an hour or more *after* their scheduled shift is done, creating the paper record.
If an IT system requires concurrent documentation, any time-and-motion study will find the IT system to require more time for record creation because the record-creation activities often occur "out of sight" in the paper world.
My own experience, rather limited I must say, is that getting *to* the data-recording step with IT can be rather cumbersome, even if the actual typing is easy. A "smart" system will pop up the entry fields when needed, but making it "smart" may be quite an undertaking indeed.
Dan Johnson md
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