Please, sir, may I have an EHR?

Thank you, Andre Picard, for restating the case for a significant investment in the electronic health record. It can't come soon enough.

We (finally!) got the last 3 docs in our clinic on our EHR. Just the fact that our staff don't have to search out paper charts 100's of times a day is a huge bonus. I can hardly wait until the Health Region's lab computer can communicate with our system so results can flow directly into patient records. What are we doing in the meantime? Glad you asked.


We have the most ridiculous, Rube Goldberg system to get patient information from the regional lab into our patient records. The lab generates results electronically, makes them into faxable format, and faxes the results to us. Until recently, we pulled the faxes off the machine, SCANNED THEM BACK ONTO THE COMPUTER (!!!) and then assigned them to a patient's electronic record. (Recently, we got a program working that eliminates the re-scanning step.)

Aside from the amount of staff-time this takes, it destroys the potential of the data. If the lab results we received stayed in electronic format, then our computer could search for, say, all men with a PSA level over 10, or a creatinine over 300, or whatever parameter we wanted to track. But, as the information is stored as a picture of the data, the computer has no idea what information is actually contained in the file. If I want to follow a man's PSA level over several years, I have to re-enter that data into electronic form. Nice use of my time...

The waste (staff-time, opportunity to improve care, etc.) is staggering.