Pharmaguy's Insights Into Drug Industry News

In a recent Rand study commissioned by the American Medical Association, doctors said being able to provide high quality healthcare is the primary driver of their satisfaction. However, the study also found the number of factors contributing to dissatisfaction is becoming almost insurmountable.

A study in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine found that emergency physicians spent 43 percent of their time entering data into a computer, compared to only 28 percent of their time spent talking to patients.  It went on to say that “during a typical 10-hour shift, a doctor would click a mouse almost 4000 times.”

United States citizens have followed the Ebola outbreak in West Africa for nearly 6 months, with concern mounting about the disease arriving on US shores, apparently for good reason. The readiness of the health care system for Ebola was challenged by the very first case. The press in part focused on whether the electronic health record (EHR) contributed to the missed diagnosis, but the right question to be asking is how a modern computer system should perform in this circumstance.

What should the public expect from the $48 billion appropriation to promote health information technology (IT) adoption made under the HITECH provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act? One goal is greater adoption of EHRs. That is happening. The expenditure, multiplied many-fold by investment of dollars and time across health care, has prompted more than half of physicians to use EHRs—up from 5% in 2008. However, EHRs purchased under the meaningful use program are not yet nimble enough to rearrange the display of health information based on either patient or public health context and they do not communicate with public health. Five years after the enactment of meaningful use, public health officials still reach clinicians and hospitals through traditional dispatches and media alerts. Not emphasizing the most salient data under an extenuating circumstance may ironically distract a busy clinician from an urgent task at hand.

Compounding the problem is that public health, largely absent from the table in defining requirements, remains mostly locked out of the point of care, barely able to exploit the newly deployed health information technology (HIT) infrastructure.