EHRs represent an ontology of sorts that has been designed with the best of intentions by the HHS and other interested medical people. There is a survey of doctors and hospitals on how well the EHR changes are effecting health care in hospitals, physician offices, medical labs and other places.
This is the first BIG ontology based standard that I know of, and in concept it’s nearly impossible to disagree with. But the EHR is imposing a burden on physicians and lab techs of all kinds; it also produces some benefits. We need to study those benefits and costs if we want to evaluate this ontology task as a prototype of other future tasks we may consider.
This slide:
http://www.medscape.com/features/slideshow/public/ehr2014?src="">
is pretty damning, IMHO, in that it says the cost has mainly been paid in reduced care for the patients. But there have been benefits for the docs, such as improved collections, integration with their insurance billing, and so on.
The survey as a whole starts at:
http://www.medscape.com/features/slideshow/public/ehr2014?src="">
and contains 35 slides summarizing the surveyed opinions. Unfortunately, the individual contributions have been nulled out by showing only summary data, so there is no deeper data pool to dive into so far as I am aware. It would be nice to have more descriptive prose from the docs and nurses and techs before limiting the view to just summarized data, as Medscape has done.
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
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