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Friday, June 13, 2014

Doctors Are Talking: EHRs Destroy the Patient Encounter

By Neil Chesanow
MedScape
Originally published May 22, 2014

There's no doubt that electronic health records (EHRs) spark strong emotions in doctors -- and many of those emotions are negative.

The gripes cover three main areas: One, EHRs have made the patient encounter far more annoying and complex than it ever was before.

Two, many physicians feel that EHRs take doctors who were trained to be independent thinkers and constrain their ability to make independent decisions, causing them to feel like data entry clerks, with a computer telling them how to practice medicine.

Last but not least, a large number of physicians feel that EHRs erode the doctor-patient relationship by creating a barrier between the two.

This article, and several others, about EHRS are here.