Doc urges more ‘meaningful’ EMR use

WOONSOCKET – A staff physician at Thundermist Health Center and executive at an Andover, Mass., health care IT firm has published an open letter to Dr. David Blumenthal, national coordinator for health information technology, urging him to focus more on patients’ needs.
The federal government has provided millions of dollars in incentives for doctors to adopt electronic medical records, as long as they engage in “meaningful use” of EMRs.
But in his letter, published in Modern Healthcare, Dr. Jonathan Leviss, a doctor and vice president and chief medical officer of Sentillion, praises Blumenthal’s approach but urges him to pay more attention to the role of “connections” between patients and providers, lest EMRs weaken them even more.
At Thundermist, Leviss notes, EMRs support “all patient-related communication and data exchanges,” with built-in alerts to new test results, e-prescribing and test orders, message relaying for patients, and tools for doctors to discuss management of a shared patient.
The EMR system allows doctors to address patients’ needs as they occur, rather than only during office hours, and it allows them to serve patients remotely, Leviss noted. Many places are also using them for “virtual visits,” which consumers appreciate.
But this doesn’t diminish the need for a more personal connection, Leviss stressed – and that is the current danger with EMRs.
“We need an interaction that is more three-dimensional, more human, than technical connections alone enable,” he writes. Recent reports have shown technology can disconnect providers from patients, he notes, leading them to enter computerized orders without fully evaluating the patients, and thus making mistakes.
“We need to determine the limits of technically connected care, at least within the paradigm of our existing technologies, and then advocate for the ‘meaningful use’ of personal health care connections between patients and providers,” he writes.
The full article is available on Modern Healthcare’s Web site.