cardinaldirection: Give a read to the Third Law of Thermodynamics.

While the body strives to homeostasis, it ultimately fails. Time and age are not friends of the human body. Nothing but wine and cheese get better with time...and them? Only to a certain point, after which vinegar and a moldy, fermented mess.

Our spirits (non-alcoholic) may strive for wholeness and harmony, but the Universe is remarkably uncooperative.

I think I get it.........Chinese hackers breaking into hospital records (death of privacy/security) gives birth to identity theft/fraud etc.    It's all just a harmonious cycle......hehe  

Pond scum comment from the cesspool.

EHR's are garbage and mostly unusable in any meaningful sense, save for a few time-saving components (e.g., electronic prescription writing).  They exist primarily to mine data for third parties, particularly the government, not to help doctors better care for patients or make the delivery of healthcare more efficient.  The tighter the security, the more cumbersome and unusable the system.  However, so many people of unknown integrity have access to them, well outside the circle of people immediately responsible for care, as to make technical security safeguards meaningless.  Protected Health Information, as a concept, is a joke.  You can't get a thing done in the healthcare system without giving access to everything to everybody.  The ability to share the important narrative information with people who need to know it in a timely fashion has been completely hamstrung by EHR's.  They generate stream-of-consciousness documents with multiply redundant and mostly useless minutiae so dense as to make ferreting out clinically useful information orders of magnitude more difficult.  A 10-page report of an ER visit for a laceration serves only to waste electronic storage and bandwidth.  And makes my brain hurt.  Patients ultimately suffer when the stuff that matters to their well-being gets buried in a blizzard of useless bullshit.  They haven't been able to separate the stuff that should just be metadata from the substantive stuff (Do I really need to have a listing of hourly vital signs for the duration of a 4 day hospital stay in the discharge 'summary'?).  The means have become the ends, totally divorced from reality.

Other than that, I love EHR's.

You don't even want to get me started on the major fuckuperry these walking-talking collection of pharmaceutical-kick-back-laden asswipes are capable of and how they have gone out of their way to destroy any and all faith I may ever have had or will have in the medical community. From putting stuff in my file that wasn't true to the latest...telling me I absolutely HAD to forgo ALL my pain medication for a procedure I had done a couple weeks ago.  What I take on a daily basis, just my morning dose, would knock the average person out for a good 24 hours, I'm sure. Some nurse got it in her head that I needed to go at least 15 hours without ANY of it before the procedure. The day of the procedure, as I sat crumpled in the hallway going in, crying from withdraw, insane pain in my my back, knees, legs and everything else, I realized once again why I bring my wife with me to most of these appointments...it's so I don't do anything that will land me on the evening news to one of these morons. 

I don't know what is worse. That they keep doing shit like this to me or that I keep nodding and going along with the shit they say like the last fuckup never happened and I can actually trust them to know what the fuck they are doing.

Colleges. Universities. Nursing Schools. With diplomas in hand. Isn't the first rule of medicine something like 'Do no harm'? I think it's time to start suing the universities and colleges these idiots graduate from...go right to the source,,cause obviously by the scale..the rather LARGE scale of idiots running amok out there with PhD's and other licenses to poke...something is being left out of their education and I would venture to guess it's the part about serving humanity, having humanity, and knowing what humanity means.

It's all about the $$$ anymore. The humanity part left a long time ago..

By way of background, FWIW, I'm a bit of a geek.  I've been using a computer to do my clinical documentation since 1984, with my practice having always been to have every encounter note include all pertinent historical and current information concisely on no more than a single page.  We've been using an EHR in my 4-physician practice for over 4 years and I'm the office SysAdmin, with a 'real' IT support guy always in the bullpen.  So I am a fan of what technology can bring to the table in a medical practice and my opinions have some basis in real-life experience.

Problem is 'following policy' has become more important than taking care of the patient.  No offense, Phoon, but a good clinician beats 'policy' every time.  And there are only two things a good clinician can bring to bear in caring for a patient: knowledge and time.  I would rather my clinician be spending his time researching and reflecting on my issues than having his head buried in a computer screen clicking box after box after box to meet the demands of documentation policy.  It's a terrible waste of a highly valuable resource, one that both the clinician and society have invested very heavily in.  If the real-world result of EHR use was greater efficiency for the clinician delivering care, enabling the clinician to devote greater time and energy to clinical work, I'd be one of those 'raving' supporters.  Just the opposite is the case, unfortunately, despite information-access benefits.  If my livelihood depended on using our EHR as designed, with a full load of patients, I would have pursued other employment long ago.  I've found ways to use the beneficial pieces of the EHR while avoiding the template-based documentation that spits out verbose but sterile, generic pabulum that fails to meaningfully integrate all the problems & issues with which a patient may be contending.

As for PACS, I've been waiting 3 years for a 64-bit client to become available to access images.

Daiwa, thank you for taking the time to explain it from your stance! You provide legit concerns and points that unfortunately fail to sink in to the brains of the politicians and corporate giants. You, as well, are outside of the  "pond scum" realm.  The ones I've been so colorfully referring to are just simply arrogant ass holes that think they are above following policy, and that is their only justification. I've seen many of them and the below mentioned corporate entities let them get away with it because they make money for the corporation. 

Agreed.. HIPAA in it's current form does strangle the productivity aspect. If that productivity goal is in the best interest of providing the best care to the most people in the least amount of time then it is sad indeed.

If the productivity goal is a banner set by a corporate CFO/CEO ( aka... Community Health Systems ) with the sole intent of getting more income at any cost then that is another story. 

Oh.. and a bit of inside FYI... Community was hacked because they failed to maintain patching on a VPN device. That was the entry point. Don't know if they used any known credentials to do it or if it was a known weakness in the system...

That's very distressing to me, Po, though nothing to how it distresses you.  I'm embarrassed on behalf of the profession and very sorry you've had to suffer such fools.

Po's been through the mill. So unhappy about your suffering.