In response to my post "A Brief Primer on Health IT Problems" which I cross-posted to the site EMRUpdate.com, I received this response from another physician at this link:
I engage the so called "IT physician leader", who is non clinical in our hospital system. She told me that this is the "future", even before I could express my concern of work flow disruption with the Cerner system we have. Not realizing that I have an EMR for 11 years. You would think these pundits would ask assistance or input from successful implementers, but they are too arrogant and proud! It is frustrating to say the lease.
It takes 2 to 4 times longer to rounds and navigate the system. Then they wonder why the patient satisfaction on their floors waxes and wanes. Priorities shifted to documentation, that makes the system received accolades from organizations I never heard of till the last 10 years.
I replied as follows:
Re: I engage the so called "IT physician leader", who is non clinical in our hospital system. She told me that this is the "future", even before I could express my concern of work flow disruption
Please feel free to submit my full Reading List to your organization's Board of Directors, along with questions as to exactly why it is "our future."
Re: You would think these pundits would ask assistance or input from successful implementers, but they are too arrogant and proud!
You are right on the money to an extent even you may not realize.
Sir, here's the reply I received from the CMO at the hospital where my mother was nearly killed by EMR-caused error, in response to my confidential, explicit, two-page warning letter a month before the catastrophe about EHR deficiencies I'd been observing in my mother's care. I sent the letter to the CMO and the CEO confidentially, as a favor. My letter concluded that "if these problems are left unremediated, patients may be harmed."
The response:
Dear Scot, I had received and read your email and elected, in view of the extraordinarily unproductive discourse we have had in the past between yourself and a number of the professional staff** [see note below - ed.], that it was best not to engage. I thank you for the courtesy of a copy of your letter to the CEO and I remain extremely proud of the past and ongoing accomplishments of our Clinical Information Systems leadership and staff.
** NOTE: ['unproductive discourse' translation: bureaucratese for "discourse" appx. two years prior with the non-medical CIO regarding what constitutes good Medical Informatics practices, and with the CMO himself who'd paradoxically opined that informatics-educated physicians (like myself) were not the 'sine qua non' of healthcare informatics projects - ed.]
In other words, you are not an expert, we are; your warning letter sucks, and go Bug Off.
Remarkably and (sadly) ironic, in another time and place in the 1980's when we had worked together, this same physician now telling me to bug off had written me glowing recommendation letters extolling my computer expertise, which ultimately helped me secure a Yale postdoctoral fellowship in Medical Informatics. Now I was telling him his current hospital had a problem; his reaction - we don't think so, there's nothing you can teach us, in fact we're the Bee's Knees in IT.His own "physician IT expert" (sans any professional computer or informatics education or experience I could discern), I learned, had settled a malpractice suit involving the death of a young person with an in-your-face, rip-roaring soft tissue infection, with a WBC (white blood cell) count exceeding 20,000 but sent out of the ED without antibiotics, for appx. $1.5 million dollars.
I only wish I had made all this up.
One month later, my mother was nearly dead-by-EMR, ironically due to almost the same issues as in my confidential warning letter. She remains crippled nearly a year later.
I ask readers to suggest an appropriate adjective describing those responsible...
-- SS
p.s. after the accident, the CMO sent me this:
"We are not perfect and we are always willing to look in the mirror"
Gee, thanks, I thought, the needlessly-broken rear view mirror of the wrecked car, with my mother in extremis after huge cerebral hemorrhage and emergency craniotomy.
This story is so tragic, and so revealing of hospital IT and clinical leadership arrogance and "pride", I am considering writing a book on the episode. I view it as a civic duty in protecting the health of the public from EHR risks. There's quite a lot more to tell.
-- SS
0 comments:
Post a Comment