Buried Under Stacks

If Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are being adopted at a record pace, then why are hospitals slow to abandon physical paperwork? Anoto, a digitizer of of healthcare processes, claims that paper is the preferred medium for healthcare professionals and 'will be for the foreseeable future.'

Why? What is driving this resistance to digital records? Respondents to a survey claim that this is all a part of the burden of the new Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). Employees responded that 75% of their time is spent working on or processing paperwork. While that is a tremendous statistic, I don't think it tells the whole story.

Employees are required to do this paperwork, so the resistance isn't against the digital medium itself. The resistance is against doing work twice. You read it yourself, employees spend 75% percent of their time working with physical copies, so when would they be able to input this data into the computer? If they were able to input digital files the first time, there would not be such a problem.

Now, the issue lies with how this data can be inputted digitally the first time. For those who work in an office with constant access to a computer, this is a non-issue. But, those who work directly with patients cannot jog back and forth between the patient and a computer. There are a couple of ways to tackle this problem.

Workstations on wheels (WOWs) are exactly what they sound like. These desktop computers are powered by batteries and are portable. Employees can drag WOWs around with them to patients and input data directly. The downsides are that these workstations are bulky and distracting. Employees may find it difficult to work on such a machine while they communicate with patients. This leads me to...

Tablets. If employees carried around tablets or smartphones that were synced with the hospital records, the problems associated with WOWs would vanish. These devices are smaller and thus less distracting. Data would be uploaded instantly to the EHR, drastically reducing time spent on paper work.

Of course, until a study backs up my suggestions, they are only theoretical.


Source: Healthcare Still Buried In Paperwork