ate their retirement dates.
The fact is that the technology has come a long way, and with prop-
er and continued training, most people get over their fear of technolo-
gy quickly. But there are workarounds for those who are too reluctant
to change. Let's say I'm an incredibly busy surgeon who sees so many
patients that I just don't have the time to mess around with EHRs. I'll
have someone by my side — a scribe — to enter everything for me.
There's also voice-recognition software capable of integrating with
EHRs that has become quite popular since its early iterations.
"What if the power goes out?" Every facility needs to have a
backup plan, with ancillary server farms as a first or second
backup. When the unexpected does happen, seasoned staff and physi-
cians should be able to adapt. But the younger physicians have spent
their careers clicking through screens rather than working from paper
charts, so when the screen isn't there, they might feel a little lost.
Even so, power outages and other disruptions are a rare occurrence,
and certainly no reason not to invest in an EHR system. The truth is
that most of these systems have an uptime of 99%, so if downtime is
1%, you're talking about 3 to 4 days a year.
"It's not standardized." In computerese, we're talking about
interoperability — essentially, being able to share patients'
health information in a secure, efficient fashion. The U.S. Department
of Health and Human Services wants EHR systems to be fully interop-
erable by 2024, meaning practitioners will be able to seamlessly share
EHRs. We're not there yet, because disparate systems can't yet "talk"
to each other, but we're seeing some positive signs. Look at what the
Indiana Health Information Exchange (ihie.org) has done. Healthcare
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