Most EHR systems do not take full advantage of the organizational and search capabilities of a computer, says Lyle Berkowitz, M.D., medical director of clinical information systems at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. “An EHR system requires too many steps” to complete the equivalent task of quickly scanning pages in a paper record, he contends. Instead, they should emulate a physician’s “thought flow,” he adds.
Rather than presenting “a bunch of static pages,” the electronic record should enable a physician to easily follow a multi-step protocol for completing a task, such as making the decision to refill a prescription or analyzing lab test results, he argues. Most records systems, however, make it far too difficult to locate all the information to complete the protocol steps, Berkowitz contends.
The physician made his comments Feb. 24 at the Physicians’ I.T. Symposium of the 2008 HIMSS Conference in Orlando.
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