The debate about whether Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems are able to do everything for a practice or not, is a long one. It has long been argued by EHR vendors that their systems are fully equipped to handle almost all the challenges a practice faces, while on the other hand, physicians have been vocal about the fact that they continue to face problems even after implementing healthcare IT in their practices. They claim that EHRs are not facilitating an evolved doctor-patient relationship, as they ideally should. They are of the opinion that EHRs are offering high value coordinated care, but are unable to accommodate unique patient cases through the system.

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The debate continues as the healthcare industry becomes more consumer-focused on a more coordinated healthcare delivery model. Let’s discuss the topic in detail.

One of the reasons for physicians’ dissatisfaction, with Electronic Health Record vendors, is that some of the big players in the market are trying to dictate practice workflows. They have a product, they sell it to a practice, but want the practice to customize its workflows to meet system requirements, and then enable themselves for incentive payments from the federal government and/or attest for Meaningful Use. While this strategy may work for smaller practices, hospitals and large healthcare centers have their own unique workflows, which sometimes are not easy to change. As a result, the entire practice workflow suffers and slows down.

The ideal way to deal with this problem is to ensure vendors are able to understand unique practice workflows, and design their product as per the requirements. This is surely going to result in better physician understanding of the product, and less time required for implementation, training and support facilities.

Patient engagement is another important area to be highlighted in this discussion. Most of the EHR vendors are quite vociferous  about how their products help practices increase patient engagement, but in fact, they are doing little to address it properly. Patient engagement truly means to make patients more aware about the state of their health, for instance glucose levels, migraines history, pregnancy results and even moods. These health trackers truly help a patient understand his/her medical condition better, while  piquing their interest in patient portals.

On another note, patient engagement can mean that practices are able to understand their patients better. It is a concept which does not merely relate to the patients. If physicians understand their patients better, they may, consequently, find their patients more engaged with them.

Interoperability has long been debated as the way through which the healthcare industry is going to move forward. While it may be a concept that, in theory, looks good, but in real life, the situation is far from it. Even today, healthcare information technology systems are still unable to connect to each other and share patient information. They are still unable to unify patient records from all physicians into one single space, and then use that information to their benefit. The need of the hour is to develop a simple, user-friendly and unified system, through which all of the patient information is shared not only between practices, hospital networks and providers, but also with regulatory authorities.

These are just some of the issues that plague the healthcare IT industry, and the reasons why physicians are dissatisfied with the workability of EHR systems. However, the industry is evolving rapidly, and it will not be too long before these problems are addressed by those at the cutting edge of innovation.