NY Times Op Ed discusses the impersonal side of EMR
Patient Safety Monitor Alert
March 18, 2009
Though electronic medical records have been hailed as a method for universally improving healthcare for the 21st century, an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times points out that bringing a computer into the examination room brings an impersonal side to the patient-physician relationship. Anne Armstrong-Coben, assistant clinical professor of pediatrics at Columbia University, wrote that although there are many benefits to encouraging the shift to an electronic system, there are drawbacks which are much often less publicized.
The author suggests that society as a whole look at the effects of the costs of depersonalizing healthcare, which is what she asserts EMRs do. Instead of interacting with the patient, she as a physician is more concerned with making sure each screen has been filled out correctly, questions are asked in the order the EMR tells them to be asked, and patient notes are not lost and forgotten among the checkboxes.
