National Physician Survey: EMR use at 75%

My name is Thomas Hall and I am Family Physician, Assistant Clinical Professor at Memorial University Medical School and a Town Councillor in my home town of Torbay, NL. I have been advocating against the increasing emphasis on pushing EMR's on physicians by medical associations both provincially and nationally, privately for the last couple of years. I have written both the NLMA and CMA on numerous occasions, but one voice is not likely to change the minds of policy makers in our profession and so I write this letter to ask for input from my colleagues.

I read a recent meta analysis today from my daily CMA daily info poem (Clinical decision support linked to EMRs doesn't decrease mortality) which highlights recent research that shows that EMR's evidence for improving medical outcomes is very thin at best and likely non existent. We should be practicing evidence based medicine, so why are the organizations that represent us continuing to push this initiative?

My biggest issue with EMR's, other than the obvious that they don't help outcomes, is that they are likely deteriorating the physician patient relationship. I say this because they are a distraction to the office visit, in that physicians are often spending more time looking at a computer screen than at their patient. I recently had a patient move to my practice because they said their physician recently switched to EMR and now does not look at them during the appointment because they are so focused on their computer.

EMR's are also excessively expensive and very time consuming and administratively complicated to set up and maintain. The country that has the most computerized medical system in the world is the USA. They also have by far have the most indebted expensive medical system that by all accounts and indicators has far worse medical outcomes than most other industrialized nations. One would hope that we could learn from our neighbour and not continue to waste our precious scarce health care dollars on initiatives that have little benefit and potentially serious consequences.

I urge any physicians that share my worries about EMR's to share these concerns with your local and national politicians and medical associations. Let's get back to focusing our limited health care resources where they can have their biggest impacts and practice evidence based medicine. I appreciate you taking your precious time in considering the above perspective.

Sincerely,

Thomas Hall

Conflict of Interest:

None declared