Electronic health records: physicians must lead

In the past year there have been a number of articles related to physicians burnout. There have been surveys in the US that attributed computer based record keeping as a significant contributor to physician burnout. While computer based records could provide significant improvements over paper records progress to what could be called high performance systems is excruciatingly slow. There is an overwhelming amount of misinformed resistance and protection of outdated systems. Vendors are slow to make changes because they see little demand from their users. Over several decades there have been repeated high level reports that provide generalizations about how things should work but there is little to no funding for physicians to participate in defining things at the level of detail that is needed to enable interoperability and a fluid exchange of data. There are many small things that could be improved on that would reduce the level of frustration and time that is needed to deal with the current crop of EMRs. Many physicians are exasperated with the intransigence of their EMR vendors and we seem to be left on our own to deal with these vendors.