User Resistance to EMRs After First Technical “Issue”

In many health IT publications, hospital staffers and clinicians have been painted as Luddites who instinctively hate technology. In this version of the EMR story, recalcitrant users are the reason for every hitch in the adoption process, and certainly a big factor when rollouts don’t work.

The truth is, however, that sometimes hospital users have good reason to dislike their EMR. In particular, they have every reason to be concerned, dismayed and just plain PO’d when they can’t get technical support in times of need.

The next challenge in getting hospital workers and clinicians to adopt EMRs is offering them some form of technical support, or reasonable workarounds, available 24/7. After all, hospital care runs every day around the clock, and it can’t stop because some template is misbehaving.

Hospital workers don’t have time to fiddle with an application if it doesn’t fit their needs or seems to be backfiring. And if they lack technical support and good tools, they’ll resort to workarounds that shouldn’t ever be used. (Consider the case of the nurse who wrote data on her hand to carry it to her EMR station.)...