anyone here living w an ostomy?

[3catwoman3]

20. The biggest reason it was time to retire 4 years ago was electronic health records - EHR.

I blame EHR for a lot of the changes in attitude and job satisfaction. You spend more time taking care of the damn computer than you do taking care of the patient.

I can only speak to this from an outpatient setting, and from one system, EPIC. My former practice made the switch in 2013, and for the next 2 years, every time I drove to work I’d find myself chanting, “I hate my job, I hate my job.”

There’s a lot of crap required in every note you write that has absolutely nothing to do with giving direct patient care, but if you don’t do it, insurance won’t cover the visit. It’s very time consuming. There are preloaded point-and-click templates for various types of illnesses and levels of visits that, IMO, are poorly written and don’t describe things well. The point-and-click templates all say exactly the same things and are stultifyingly boring to read. I ended up creating all my own templates because I wanted to my chart entries to sound like they would have if they’d been my hand-written notes - individualized to each patient.

I’d spend most of my lunch break getting at least some of my morning charting done, stay about an hour after my last patient doing some more, and then 2-3 hours of unpaid time at home each evening, finishing my documentation because I couldn’t get it done during the appointments. I’m a hunt-and-peck 6 finger typist who has to look at the keyboard, because I never took a typing class, so I couldn’t “chart” while a parent was giving the child’s history. Even if I could have, I don’t think I would have, because when a worried parent is telling you what’s bringing them to the office that day, I need to look them in the eye and pay full attention. People don’t like it when your focus is on the computer screen instead of on them.

Minimum of 10 minutes of computer charting time per patient, minimum of 18 patients a day, and you’re talking 180 minutes of computer time. I only worked 2 days a week, fortunately, or I’d likely have retired much sooner. EHR certainly took a lot of the fun out of my job.