Electronic Health Records are a topic near and dear to my heart (my wife is an RHIA coder), but frequently I find her and myself at odds as to what data is considered “important”.  While I believe there’s some discrete numbers of use, she (and most medical professionals) believe that more data is never a bad thing, which leads to unwieldy templates and huge amounts of data bloat.  Over at Rxinformatics, they look at some of the new technology dealing with the incoming tsunami of raw health data.

For example, take a look at this sample template of a H&P; the template alone is 281 lines! Now imagine that being populated with data. This is all before the provider even types a single letter into it. For a patient who presented to the ED with a CC of hypotension and the A/P  consisted of “dehydrated; gave IVF and D/Ced”, it becomes silly why the progress note would look like a senior thesis. Of course, in an era where most progress notes don’t include enough information, this observation may seem absurd to some. It becomes pertinent, though, because it seems there is an inverse relationship where healthcare providers write less the more an EHR imports data.

via Does this data make me look fat? – The Aesthetics of Raw Information | RxInformatics.com.

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