From paper medical records to electronic medical records
The government is nudging medical practices toward electronic record keeping, and I'm going to do a story on how that is affecting local practices. If you work in a practice that uses paper records -- whether you're a doc, a nurse or an administrator -- I'd be interested in hearing from you about what you see as the pluses and minuses. Ditto folks in practices that have already made the switch, and I'd also like to hear from these folks about what they learned from the transition that they'd like to pass on to other practices that haven't done so yet. Leave a comment or e-mail me. Thanks!
UPDATE: Electronic medical records (EMRs) are already such a sore subject within the health-care information-technology community that they have spawned at least two satire sites: SEEDIE.org (The Society for Enormously Expensive and Difficult to Implement EMRs) and Extormity.com, "a mega-corporation dedicated to offering highly proprietary, difficult to customize and prohibitively expensive healthcare IT solutions." These might be the most highly evolved geek-humor sites I've ever run across that don't involve actual programming languages as part of the punch line.
