A Call To For Better EMR Software

Since I know that most of you don’t go back and see the great comments that are being made on older posts, I think it’s worth highlighting comments that are interesting and valuable. Here’s a comment that was made by Jeff Epstein which I think is a good call to action for doctors to reject those EMR vendors who are great at sales and marketing, but short on delivering what’s important.

This may have been true a few years ago (EMRs being hard to install and harder to use), but in 2009 EMRs have to be simple and intuitive. EMRs have to be easy to use and they have to be helpful. I don’t want an EMR that lengthens my day (2 minutes per patient lengthens my day by an hour) and makes my job harder! I don’t care about the payers and the government and the data collectors. I care about my patients and my ability to provide excellent care, document their care, write prescriptions and order tests, consultants and a plan of care.

There are many EMRs today that ARE easy to use, easy to learn and don’t cost an arm and a leg! We have to find these EMRs and purchase these EMRs. We have to reward this type of EMR and punish the EMRs which force us to enter data for the data collectors, thereby wasting our time or expecting us to spend hours of uncompensated time doing things that benefit others.

If your EMR does not save you time, you have a bad EMR. If you have to jerry-rig your EMR to get a note done at the point-of-care, while seeing the patient, you have a bad EMR. Bad EMRs will ruin our healthcare system.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

51 Comments

  • John,

    First, the usual, “I’m not a lawyer”. Attempting to break a third party lease based on the underlying quality (or lack thereof) of the product/service could be a tough road.

    The sublease issue is another matter.

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