Epic Fail: Some Pushback From The Nurses

[...] when the medical community talks to itself online, a lot of the chatter is about the treatment of patient Thomas Eric Duncan at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas — in specific, why did it take the hospital so long to diagnose and correctly treat Duncan. Epic is a maker of computerized medical software and allied products; EHR (electronic health records) is what they sell, and EMR (emergency medical records) is one facet of EHR. [...] the incident did allow a lot of people to air their grievances about Epic EHR. About half of the computerized medical records in the country exist on Epic software, according to a well-sourced article in Wikipedia. There have long been complaints that Epic EHR does not connect well with other systems, so that the doctors of any patient transferring out of an Epic hospital will have a hard time getting his or her medical records at his new place. Long promised as the panacea for patient safety errors, electronic health records, in fact, have fragmented information, too often making critical data difficult to find. Often, doctors or nurses must log out of the system they are on and log into another system just to access data needed to treat their patients (with, of course, additional passwords required). In other words, then, the system is not entirely helpful in treating patients, particularly patients in crisis. [...] there’s a reason for that: EHR is not set up to be a clinical aid. [...] the hospitals are against it.