We previously posted about an influential piece by Dr. Atul Gawande: "Why Doctors Hate Their Computers". The New Yorker article has attracted a lot of attention, upping our clinicians' angst about the Connect Care clinical information system (CIS) launch later this year.
The Gawande article, and many others like it, raises important considerations for us as we move from system design through testing, adoption, training and readiness. Harms reduction is, unequivocally, the biggest chunk of change management.
However, Dr. Gawande's concerns reflect (roughly) just one dimension of our prospects. Many of his concerns do not, exactly, apply to our situation. Other challenges need to be exposed, explored, and mitigated. More importantly, there is a huge upside for physicians that we also need to understand, plan for, and realize.
BytesBlog will devote the first postings of 2019 to an exploration of how we can move from "why doctors hate their computers" to "why doctors love their computers." I have no doubt that we will come to love the Connect Care achievement. But we have a lot of stormy transformation to navigate first. Please use BytesBlog comments and email links to contribute your thoughts, helping us broaden the discussion and prepare together to take ownership of CIS use... for success!
Obviously, we are not alone in these discussions. A recent HealthcareITNews article references a report about how vendors (specifically Epic) are connecting with physicians to better understand the information management problems they need to solve. A related American Medical Association initiative, the "Digital Health Implementation PlayBook" captures practical steps clinicians can take to benefit from eHealth, while avoiding harms.