A Human Solution for the Complex Electronic Health Record

Electronic health records (EHRs) were touted as a pathway toward better, safer, and more inexpensive healthcare, but a look back shows improvements have been slow, often due to technology issues. While the complex array of EHR options still poses challenges, one route toward better utilization is improving how humans interact with EHRs. Efforts to develop the EHR represented a long journey from early visions to today’s reality, where EHRs have been adopted across the majority of hospitals and physicians practices throughout the U.S.

The EHR is not a simple computer application; rather, it represents a carefully constructed set of systems that are highly integrated and require a significant investment of time, money, process change, and human factor reengineering. Depending on who you talk to, EHRs have had a positive effect, very little effect, or a negative effect on healthcare. Some patients and providers prefer communicating electronically. Some patients hate that their provider spends most of the visit looking at the computer, entering data, and spending too little time on personal interaction.