Thank you for your in-depth. Now to explain why that is every bit as much Obama’s fault:
“It is far more likely that the problem at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital was due to the way they configured the system than to any inherent bug in Epic.”
If it’s not user-friendly, then Obama-care ‘aint ready.
All software used by millions needs to remember “KISS” ...
Keep
It
Simple
Stupid [not directed at you].
EMRs are by their nature complex because the human body is complex and so many complex things can go wrong in the human body. Also, hospitals are extremely complex businesses, with very complex needs for scheduling, registration, insurance, patient care, patient transportation, and on and on and on.... This was so way before Obamacare. You try to keep it simple, but if you keep it too simple it doesn't do much for you.
And as any computer programmer will tell you, with complexity comes bugs. We do our best to prevent them and to minimize their impact if they do happen, but for a good system, the benefits simply outweigh the downsides. And Epic is a good system.
Epic has excellent training available for people like me, who analyze a hospital's business operations and configure the system accordingly. They require all of their customers' implementation staff members to be trained and certified. They also require the customers' implementation staff to develop training programs for the end users, and they provide model curricula the customer adjusts to reflect their hospital's implementation. The quality of that end user training, though, is completely in the hands of the customer, not Epic. So while it may have been a configuration issue, it may also have been a training issue.
Another FReeper commented somewhere that EMRs are a scam. That's a very uninformed opinion. It's like saying Windows or Linux are scams because they are not perfect or because they're complex. What an integrated EMR allows you to do is absolutely remarkable. But if you rely on them too much or try to get them to solve every problem, you'll run into issues like what happened in Texas. Sometimes a Post-It note is the right technology.
For every problem introduced by an EMR, I guarantee you there would be 100 worse problems if we relied solely on paper. More than employing KISS technology, or just as important, is to find the right balance between technology and manual processes.