One of the issues that users of EMR face is the need to develop best practices in the exam room during the patient encounter. A excellent article published in the March 2006 edition of Family Practice Management entitled EHRs in the Exam Room: Tips on Patient-Centred Care (.pdf) describes 10 strategies that, if followed, will enhance the encounter when using a computer.
The article includes strategies such as knowing when to push the computer monitor away during the encounter, enhancing your typing skills and pointing to the screen when discussing data that is being viewed. In addition, remembering to look at your patient and not focus on the monitor during the encounter.
The majority of these recommendations are just good common sense, however it is easy to become more focused on the technology than on the patient.
How do you retain a patient-centred approach when using an EMR in the exam room? Add your suggestions and comments by clicking on the 'Comments' link below.
This is an interesting article that speaks to the issue of usability of EMR/EHR in the exam room.
"When brought into the exam room, computers act as a kind of third member in the relationship between doctor and patient, concludes a study published in Annals of Family Medicine. Whether the computer enhances or weakens the relationship depends both on how easy it is to use and how skilled physicians are in making use of it.
Physicians were often conflicted between recording data in the EHR [electronic health record] and giving patients one-on-one attention, wrote the study's authors, led by William Ventres of Multnomah County Health Department in Portland, Ore." Link: EHRs Enter Patient-Doctor Relationships.
Link: Physicians, Patients, and the Electronic Health Record: An Ethnographic Analysis -- Ventres et al. 4 (2): 124 -- Annals of Family Medicine.
Posted by: Alan Brookstone | April 05, 2006 at 09:48 AM