Why do some physicians hate using Epic EMRs?

Why do some physicians hate using Epic EMRs?

Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), have been hailed as the solution to our healthcare delivery woes. The healthcare industry has often been criticized for its lack of adoption of information technology, most evident in the fact that they send millions of faxes – seriously, who uses a fax machine anymore?

Epic, one of the most widely used EMRs, is, for the most part, configured onsite by the hospital or healthcare system’s IT team. As a result, an individual physician’s experience with their EMR is largely dependent on the extent to which their internal IT team can assess the needs of, customize to, and change workflows to make the EMR work for the physicians.

EMRs have often been criticized for not caring about usability, however, the EMR vendors themselves (such as Epic), have little they can do help, outside of releasing major updates that seriously overhaul the entire user interface. Even in these cases, end users, including physicians, could still become frustrated and complain of inferior usability simply due to the comfort level that they had attained with the previous version of the interface.

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