Discussion: '3 straight difficult overnight shifts...'

ugh...you ought to have 'Jeff's corner' on AP where you tell stories of the lame & dumb & otherwise & how one learns to love humanity partic around 04-0500 on the second or third night in a row. Get some sleep.... 'Twas the day before the Goat' & Dr. Schapiro was searching for energy:).

Unfortunately, I'm the one feeling like the lame and the dumb as I wrestle with our new, fully electronic medical record which was implemented two weeks ago with practically no warning. I estimate that my efficiency has improved from 60% of my baseline to 85%, but I don't see much more room for improvement unless they customize the various template options to organize them as a physician thinks as opposed to how a programmer organizes code. I see all sorts of evidence of "subroutines" being dropped into the template in the order they were written, not in the order of relevance to the patient's complaint, and there is far too much clutter catering to the breadth of possible complaints to be particularly useful for any single presentation. On top of it all, there has been a roughly 25% spike in patient volume, largely but not solely attributable to the swine flu, at precisely the same time. I have not had a single night I would consider even reasonable, and on my last shift, non-priority patients had to wait a minimum of 4 hours for my attention right up to 7:00 AM.

ouch...& when you finally get to see one of them at 0630, who's more irritable.... Good that swine flu has quieted. EMR, in large part, is a business perpetration...my opinion last I worked w/. Remote access & perhaps legible scripts are ok but after that the woods get thick.