Comments on: “More and Better Patient Information Equals More Lawsuits for Physicians”

By: throckmorton

throckmorton — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 18:49:36 +0000

Nevins hit the nail on the head. The purpose of medical documentation used to be to help take better care of the patient by giving you the information you needed. Now it is the opposite, the EMR is so full of irrevelant information that what is truly needed is lost. We have adversely affected the signal to noise ratio. I tell my residents, if you want to hide money, put it between the pages of book and then put the book on the shelves of the biggest library that you can find.

By: Marilyn Mann

Marilyn Mann — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 01:02:30 +0000

Interesting how the same headline can mean different things to different people. When I read “more and better patient information,” I thought it referred to information in the hands of the patient. When I clicked on the link and read the article, it turns out that “patient information” means information *about* a patient.

By: nevins

nevins — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 18:19:54 +0000

Problem is that the quality of information available hasn’t improved, the amount of chaff present has expanded greatly (a result of the ability of electronic records to embellish the text of the details of physical examination and history by filling in reams of ‘normal’ that might or might not have actually been rigorously determined as truly normal) and the presentation of information in all its details is vastly inferior to organization present in the old handwritten documents.
My anesthetic record that could quite adequately describe the events of a day’s work on one page now fills a printed document 25-30 pages long. If I want to alert the next guy to something important in the electronic record there is almost no chance that he will find it now. Patient loses, then the doc.