AMA CMIO: EHRs Are Falling Short of Meeting the Needs of Doctors

Michael Hodgkins warns that innovation needs to consider integration with clinician’s workflow.

Health IT vendors are still missing the mark when it comes to answering the needs of America’s burnt-out physicians. “This is not about putting our hands up and saying stop innovation,” said Michael Hodgkins, MD, vice president and chief medical information officer at the American Medical Association. “It is simply about the need to focus on evidence, accuracy, how it’s integrated with our EHRs and how it’s integrated within our practice.”

It’s not necessarily news that broad dissatisfaction is darkening the mood in the physician community. According to Hodgkins, who delivered his remarks at HIMSS17 on Tuesday, physicians are spending twice the amount of time on deskwork and EHR maintenance, including 38 hours a month spent on EHRs after work hours, than they are treating patients.

The AMA probed that dissatisfaction in a recent survey and found with issues, there are really only a handful that plagues them. Physicians want to provide high-quality care, but EHR work seems to get in the way of that, he said. At the same time, practice sustainability and changing reimbursement models that favor scale and shift risk to the providers is leading many practices to merge or sell out altogether...