Dr. John Sotos, a cardiologist and flight surgeon, is critical of electronic medical records. In the Wall Street Journal, he writes, “Without doubt, electronic medical records are killing and injuring people, for some of the same reasons that airplanes crash.”
Aviation engineers, he says, have known that the human-to-technology interface can lead to accidents, but doctors and nurses are less cognizant of this fact. And that’s a problem, because nurses are chained to a computer station on wheels that goes with them from patient room to patient room.
He explains, “A basic nursing task, such as documenting a patient’s urination, requires the nurse to walk to the computer, sign on to the EMR (itself a chore), grasp the mouse, select the patient, click a ‘urination’ tab (eventually), move hands to keyboard, type the volume of urine, then click ‘save.’ Any new data, alerts or orders on the screen will distract the nurse from thinking about the significance of the urine volume just produced.” Before EMRs, a nurse could log the relevant data on a clipboard hanging at the foor of the bed in from four to six seconds.
He adds, “EMR vendors must realize that the human-computer interface in their systems is more than a marketing differentiator. It is instead, like cockpit controls, a critical component in a critical system that must be designed to be undemanding of attention and cognition.”
Read Dr. Sotos’s complete article here, and see also these related articles:
