Sunday, June 8, 2008

Extormity, a classic EMR

Finally someone who has illustrated my feelings on EMRs beautifully and intelligently by creating a tongue in cheek website adverstising what we all know so very well, the EMR company who tries hard, very hard to extort you, to sell you a "product" that is still underdeveloped, underperforms, yet is horribly expensive due to initial purchasing cost, training, installation, and especially due to (the big hope for additional regular income of all EMR companies) the cost of maintenance!

Take a look at this: http://www.extormity.com/

This is the right answer when all those "experts" on health care just state how flabbergasted they are that those physicians are sooo slow in adopting such a wonderful new and effective technology that promises soooo much improvement....Right?

Right! Speaking of personal experience, EMRs are immature, at the level of performace of MS DOS Word 2.0 as compared to WinWord today, they are a drain on performance, usually are designed and programmed by people as far away as possible from daily clinical practice and by far too expensive.
My personal hope is for Google or someone wiht enough smarts to actually listen to users (yes, us physicians) to come up with a really good electronic medical record that is easy and intuitive to use, fast, saves work instead of creating it.
Until then consultants, hold your opinions and maybe, maybe, do the unthinkable - actually try using one yourself. I know that this is a bad no-no for experts and consultants, but it might be worth a try once in a while....