HealthyData Blog
In healthcare, there are so many regulations and technologies to stay current on. In our HealthyData blog, you will read everything from CMS meaningful use to EMR news, clinical best practices and QAPI program initiatives.
Because our headquarters are in Madison, WI and many of our valuable customers are also Epic clients, we cannot help but notice when Epic has one of its major user events (UGM and XGM). Known by the “outside world” mostly for their fun and wild themes, and enjoyed by the non-invited at the “after parties” throughout the city, they are famous for filling up all the hotels and bringing a bit of chaos to our incredible city.
I worked at Epic for 12 years and I'm a big fan of what they do to innovate their products to meet the needs of clinicians. However, no matter how good the Epic EMR software is, implementing an infinitely complex piece of software in an infinitely complex industry brings with it many short-comings.
A few that I saw the most during my tenure at Epic were:
Despite massive adoption of electronic medical records over the past several years, the promise of easy and nearly effortless chart abstraction from electronic medical records enabled by an interconnected web of interoperable EMRs sharing standardized data has yet to be fully realized. You need to look no further than the media tab to see the evidence that we have yet to arrive at this Utopian future.
Document management associations and consulting organizations have published a mountain of studies addressing the inefficiencies of manually keying data from unstructured documents to electronic databases. Most acknowledge that manual data entry is error prone, labor intensive and slows the workflow process.Yet, particularly in healthcare, it’s stunning how many organizations still rely on this practice day to day to populate demographic and lab results data into EHRs and other clinical decision support systems.
