I am not surprised at all. When I was a college student on the medical school track, there was a unique opportunity to work alongside doctors in a hospital setting. The job was to be the doctor's "scribe" and input all of the doctors findings, patient history, and document the care provided by the physician (eg, suture repairs, intubations, and other procedures).
It didn't make sense why this job existed until I actually started training on the system. The system is absolutely god awful in terms of UX experience, but after awhile (1-2 months) you get acclimated to it and could complete a chart in <5 minutes.
Some or most of the doctors I worked with absolutely hated the system itself. On many occasions, I have observed doctors input the wrong orders which if they were performed would have had severe consequences. Fortunately, 99.9% of the time the error was caught by the physician or the nurse assigned to the patient. The one instance where it wasn't caught was actually due to human error - nurse gave patient anti-hypertensive med instead of the ordered calcium channel blocker (Cardene vs Cardizem?).
On the worst occasion, one doctor I worked with struggled on a daily basis to input orders into the system. I think it would take 5-6 minutes just to input some basic orders. Someone ended up teaching him how to input the orders in free form text and the nurse(s) would just write up new orders based on that (eg, doctor would write a single order as "cbc,cmp,ua r/o uti, drug screen, CXR 1v r/o pneumonia" and the assigned nurse would recreate the orders in the system in a line-item fashion). Kind of sucks for the nurse, but I think it ended up working out better for both parties.
I ended up dropping out of the doctor career path due to this unique and eye-opening experience as a scribe (not because of the EHR software itself but figured the "doctor life" was not meant for me).
It didn't make sense why this job existed until I actually started training on the system. The system is absolutely god awful in terms of UX experience, but after awhile (1-2 months) you get acclimated to it and could complete a chart in <5 minutes.
Some or most of the doctors I worked with absolutely hated the system itself. On many occasions, I have observed doctors input the wrong orders which if they were performed would have had severe consequences. Fortunately, 99.9% of the time the error was caught by the physician or the nurse assigned to the patient. The one instance where it wasn't caught was actually due to human error - nurse gave patient anti-hypertensive med instead of the ordered calcium channel blocker (Cardene vs Cardizem?).
On the worst occasion, one doctor I worked with struggled on a daily basis to input orders into the system. I think it would take 5-6 minutes just to input some basic orders. Someone ended up teaching him how to input the orders in free form text and the nurse(s) would just write up new orders based on that (eg, doctor would write a single order as "cbc,cmp,ua r/o uti, drug screen, CXR 1v r/o pneumonia" and the assigned nurse would recreate the orders in the system in a line-item fashion). Kind of sucks for the nurse, but I think it ended up working out better for both parties.
I ended up dropping out of the doctor career path due to this unique and eye-opening experience as a scribe (not because of the EHR software itself but figured the "doctor life" was not meant for me).