EHR Usability, Satisfaction Are Falling Among Physicians

Black Book Rankings may have been spot on when they called 2013 the Year of EHR Replacement, because a sharply increasing number of providers are very unhappy with their electronic health record systems and aren’t shy about saying it.  According to new data revealed at HIMSS13 this week, user satisfaction has dropped 12% over the past two years, and the number of very dissatisfied users has jumped by 10%.  Nearly 40% would refuse to recommend EHRs to a colleague, citing insurmountable productivity challenges, difficult software interfaces, and a lack of improvement in patient care.

In their presentation titled “Challenges with Meaningful Use: EHR Satisfaction & Usability Diminishing,” William Underwood, senior associate at the American College of Physicians and Alan Brookstone, MD, chief executive officer of Cientis Technologies, examined the results of survey data collected from 2010 to 2012, when AmericanEHR Partners queried 4,279 physicians from ten different professional societies.  Most of the physicians worked in small practices, and had been using an EHR for more than three years by the time they completed the poll.

The results were generally dismal, even as a neighboring session extolled the progress hospitals have taken towards achieving meaningful use.  More than a third of physicians said they were very dissatisfied with the ease of use of their software, up from 23% in 2010. [...]