Throckmorton:
We are now in the third month of our government mandated electronic medical records system.
TM points out several of the typical problems encountered with the current generation of electronic medical records:
- requires more staff
- less patients can be seen in a given time
- patient's feel neglected
How this will ever save money at this point at the current level of quality is beyond me.
Another point he makes that I never thought of before is that e-prescribing locks the patient into the one pharmacy that the doctor sends the script to. The patient can't call around for a better deal.
I hope someday this is fixed so that instead of the prescription being sent to a pharmacy, the script "lives" in the EMR and the pharmacy that the patient chooses to fill it accesses the script on the EMR and "fills" it that way. Given the current level of technology in EMRs and e-prescribing, I can't imaging we'll be seeing that kind of inovation any time soon. I'm still amazed that I'm limited to how many words I can use on an e-prescription. Whenever I try to write detailed instructions, it refuses to send saying it's too many characters.