08/23/2023    Jon Purdy, DPM

Regrets About Switching to EMR (Tip Sullivan, DPM)

EMR has been a joke. There is no interoperability.
It has taken away the concentration on patient
care. The costs to a practice are far more than
most realize. The obvious costs are those of the
EMR system itself, and those are always rising.
There is the cost of having to transition when
these companies go out of business or are
purchased by other companies. There are the costs
of computers and IT to maintain them. There is a
payroll cost to the added amount of time it takes
employees to input data. And the biggest cost is a
reduction in patient visits secondary to the time
it takes to process them. There are other
microeconomics at work as well.

The biggest joke is that “canned templates” were a
big compliance problem in the past, but somehow
they are perfectly acceptable now. EMR notes are
completely unreliable. I receive EMR notes for
referrals and the majority of them misrepresent
what was done. There is no way a physician
completes a full H&P on every patient every visit
yet that is what I get. The notes commonly include
negatives for nipple discharge, spleen and liver
enlargement, murmur, all cranial nerves intact,
etc.

I ask these patients what was done on their last
visit, and most say the doctor never touched them.
The referral I receive is for something podiatric
of course, but the notes state everything normal
in the lower extremity.

This was an obvious force majeure to benefit EMR
companies and the government. It does the exact
opposite of improving patient care. EMR has
actually forced many doctors into early
retirement, or to discontinue accepting Medicare
patients. Had the government provided free EMR and
it functioned as intended that would have helped,
but here we are.

Jon Purdy, DPM, New Iberia, LA

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