ZDoggMD is a physician, off-white rapper, and the founder of Turntable Health. He’s not a businessman. He’s a business, man. OK we stole that line from Jay-Z but you get the idea. A hospitalist at Stanford for almost 10 years, Dr. Z currently resides in Las Vegas—a city he finds simply adorable.
Dr. Dogg, actually, Dr. Zubin Damania, in his copious spare time, creates poignant, biting rap videos that cut right to the heart of what's wrong with medicine today. His latest offering, "EHR State Of Mind," targets, you guessed it, EHR's, and by proxy, electronic medicine in general.
Without further ado:
Watch the whole thing. Then watch it again.
Yes, it's funny, but it's sad, and it is spot on. Here's the bottom line: Most medical software programs, EHR's, PACS, etc., are VERY poorly written. They are hard to use, they get in the way of patient care, they don't communicate well if at all to other systems, they were designed to appeal to CIO's and IT types, and ignore most anything to do with how physicians and such actually use them. Or try to use them.
I'm just waiting for the first class action suit against one or more of the companies who have shoveled these steaming piles of poor coding and even worse interfaces upon us. All it will take is the deaths of a few patients that can be directly attributable to these embarrassing excuses for software. Mark my word, it will happen. Of course, these multi-billion dollar companies will pay off the plaintiffs and keep doing what they are doing. That worked for Ford and the Pinto cases; Ford committed corporate murder rather than pay $100/Pinto to fix a fatal flaw. So it will be here. And most tragic of all, CIO's and IT folk will continue to buy from the vendors who promise the best prices, the least work for the support people, the biggest installed base, and just generally anything and everything EXCEPT being usable for the end-users. That would be us.
There are very few rogues out there such as myself and ZDogg who are alerting the public to the fact that the electronic emperor has no clothes. Clearly, we are not getting anywhere, and that is because we physicians have completely lost control of this situation. And I doubt we'll ever get it back.
4 comments :
As much as I always want to "hate on the vendors"... shouldn't at least a portion of the blame be based on the requirements the gov't puts out there?
Very true, but they still could create a usable interface if the demand existed among their direct customers. Hat tip to you by the way for this video!!!!
So other than expressing general disgust about the current selection of EMR's, what specifically might you want to change in those things to make it more user friendly and useful?
Just a guess, but I think we can safely assume Mr. Unknown seems to have something to do with "the current selection of EMR's".
Gee...where do we start? I don't think I have the space. Bottom line is this: the interface needs to take its cues from a Mac, or at least Windows, and not DOS. ASK physicians how they do what they do, and find ways to HELP them do it easier and better and faster. That is what computers are supposed to do. A good EMR would be designed around the physician, and not force the physician to conform to the whims of a non-medical engineer.
The current piles of steaming code do nothing more than add an hour or more to the day of already overwrought physicians. They are responsible for an increasing number of docs leaving the field altogether.
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