CRICO Challenges EMR Complacency
CRICO, the patient safety and medical professional liability company serving the Harvard medical community, has produced a video that puts forth a future vision of how Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) might be embedded into the physician workflow in a manner that would improve health care delivery. CRICO has based the dramatization on real malpractice cases. Through combined analysis of how harm can come to patients from flawed encounters with providers, and conversations with medical and technological visionaries across the country, the video integrates various scenarios into an idealized patient/physician encounter.
Hearing significant frustration from physicians related to their experience with EMRs, CRICO was inspired to envision a way in which they might be better integrated into the clinical workflow. This would allow the EMR to offer some relief to physicians and nurses who face seemingly insurmountable challenges of time and data management. Luke Sato, MD, chief medical officer and senior vice president for CRICO said, “The impetus behind this video was to facilitate a dialogue among health care professionals – physicians, IT, hospital administrators– about why we aren’t making better progress in the development of EMRs. The best technological design is one that is integrated seamlessly into one’s life. Today’s EMRs do not accomplish this. The current EMR is passive–the physician has to actively look for data instead of the technology anticipating what the physician needs to act on.”
Opinions within the health care industry are diverse about EMRs but there has been no apparent leader in this field making a concerted effort to design the next generation of EMRs with the physician in mind. In addition to a need for standards across systems, the manual data entry of today’s EMRs adds to the burden of already time-pressed physicians.
CRICO partnered with David Ting, MD, associate medical director for information systems at Massachusetts General Hospital, who said of the video, “The actual purpose of the video is to ask whether we might intelligently prioritize today’s choices to move our institutions toward improved patient care and improve provider and practice work-life experience.”
While most of the technology that is used in this dramatization is available today, other elements are further out. CRICO’s future vision, as depicted in the video, is meant as a launching pad to begin the conversation about how new technologies can provide a way to enable EMRs to enhance, streamline, and make safer the patient-physician encounter.
Dr. Ting has encouraged his colleagues at MGH to view the video and share their feedback. The physician reaction has elicited a variety of reactions and diverse feedback ranging from “cool, efficient, saves time and improves outcomes” to “I don’t want voices interfering with my patient interactions.” The video is available for viewing on the CRICO website, www.rmf.harvard.edu/EMR.