Fixing Electronic Data Capture

David Yeager
For The Record, Vol. 24 No. 5 P. 20
March 12, 2012

Most healthcare industry experts agree that EHRs can be vehicles for gathering immense amounts of data. For healthcare as a whole, that’s good. For clinical care providers themselves, maybe not so much.

An electronic documentation tide is threatening to swamp clinical care providers. Because of their proximity to patients, doctors, nurses, and other clinical care staff are being asked to do something they probably didn’t envision when they decided to join the medical field: collect data for billing, regulatory compliance, and other ancillary purposes.

Data collection is a source of growing frustration among clinicians because, although it’s important to the medical enterprise, it diverts time and energy from their primary focus of treating patients.

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