As a physician, I’ve worked with Epic. They’ve ruined patient care and physician education. Don’t get me started.
The physician complaints about Epic are they they track EVERYRTHING—and that stuff is reviewed by managers who do not know how to manage.
I’ve done some work as a consultant and analyst on clinicians and their effectiveness.
What these EMR systems have done is to make it easier to get data. The problem with that is the people working with the data are idiots—and they turn around and say to the docs, “Why did you do that?” “Nationally we can turn around a discharge in 2 hours, how come you added that extra test?” “Why did that bed remain ‘dirty’ for 24 hours after the patient died.”
The “quality management” movement seems to just be entering into the Hospital Administration world. I came into the hospital world after being a Strategic Initiatives guy back in the mid 90’s. I would sit in meetings, literally with my jaw dropping, at how shitty these managers were. And when I started my last “life” in that field I can see how that—combined with almost unlimited access to real time data—is screwing the MDs and nurses.
Epic may seem to be the cause. Its not. It is crappy training, crappy management, and crappy implementation—just as SAS was crappy in the 1990s.
(And never, in 30 years of doing this stuff have I met a more close minded group of people than hospital administrators.)