I opened the note and saw an incredibly long note with results of every stress test, lipid, echo and cath done on the patient in the last 10 years pasted into the note. In addition there was even the informed consent statement prior to the cath included in the note. There was a note by the PA and then a note by the consultant buried in this morass of digital ink. It took me 10 minutes to find the consultant's assessment and plan which said to continue medical management. Apparently there was one small vessel that was stenosed and was not worth the risk of intervention.
Got me to start wondering if EHRs have caused us to lose our way; we have forgotten that the primary purpose of the medical record is communication. It seems that E/M coding and medico-legal issues are all that EHRs are being used for.
Can we save the EHR? What if we have a field at the top of each EMR note that allows only 140 characters like a Twitter update and each doctor has to populate this with a summary of assessment and plan before the note can be closed? E.g. "80% 1st diag, stable angina, not worth risk of intervention, recc aggressive medical Mx" This would still leave 53 characters to reach the 140 character limit! Could use this to provide a link to the actual chart note!
We could even make the poor Infectious Disease consultant happy. Every time someone copies and pastes their note into their own, there would be automatic attribution like a RT @IDdoc!
We could have a twitter like list of our patients that we follow and we can see tweets about them by all docs!
So what do you think? Any takers?