Healthcare IT Should Respect Physicians’ Time

[Don Burt]

One of physicians’ long-standing frustrations with healthcare IT is the time required to learn to use it. Many hospital EMRs call for days of classroom training, which takes physicians away from their patients and costs them money in lost revenue. Then, even after all the training, the EMR user experience for physicians often is decidedly “un-friendly”, and routine activities can take longer than they did using paper-based systems.

Now, a recent research report contains some good news for physicians. Healthcare IT research firm KLAS® evaluated a computerized physician order entry (CPOE) “component” software product from PatientKeeper Inc. – an “overlay” to McKesson Horizon and Paragon – that scores 8.3 on KLAS’s 9-point overall-ease-of-use scale, far higher than any of the popular complete EMR systems widely deployed at hospitals, including McKesson’s. (KLAS calls PatientKeeper’s score “preliminary” because of the number of customers they interviewed.) And significantly, KLAS reports that
computer-savvy physicians learn to use PatientKeeper CPOE in as little as 10 minutes.

Obviously, the value of EMRs is compromised if physicians refuse to use them for any reason. It’s important to remember that physicians’ attitudes about (and adoption of) EMRs is informed not only by their user experience, but also by the time they’re required to spend – or “waste” – learning how to use them. Only by providing physicians with software that is both easy to use and learn will the clinical patient care goals of EMRs be attained.

The executive summary of KLAS’s research report, “PatientKeeper 2013: A New Take on Inpatient CPOE”, is available here.

Donald Burt is the Chief Medical Officer at PatientKeeper, a sponsor of "The Floor Plan"on McKesson Social.