A hospital administrator reminding us of security issues of paper medical records & faxes: http://t.co/D9XpuRdh8O (bottom of page) #EHR #HIE
— CORHIO (@CORHIO) July 25, 2014
I loved this tweet. It’s a great reminder that far too often when we look at EHR Implementations we compare it against a world that is 100% and 100% efficient. This is an unfair comparison. Instead of comparing EHR against the perfect world, we need to compare EHR to the alternative. In most cases, we should be comparing the EHR world to the paper chart world. Doing so makes all the difference.
I’ve written previously about this concept when I wrote, It’s Not Like Paper Charts Were Fast. In that instance I was comparing the speed of EHR documentation with paper chart documentation. They’re much closer than we like to remember. In fact, in many cases EHR documentation is much faster than paper charts. Although, critics of EHR prefer to compare the speed of EHR to an automatic documentation world. Unfortunately, the automatic documentation world is still a fantasy. Hopefully that dream eventually comes true.
As the tweet above mentions, the same could be applied to security. No doubt there are security challenges in an EHR world. However, there were and are security challenges with paper charts and faxes as well. For example, there was no good way to audit who accessed a paper chart. That’s not an issue in an EHR world. I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
When evaluating EHR, let’s always remember to compare it to the alternative and not the perfect world that really doesn’t exist.
