EMRs and Templates: How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Boilerplating

On Kevin MD, there was a recent post about the problems associated with templating and John mentioned in his weekend EHR Twitter roundup. Some EMRs provide automation for notes so that a provider can check a few boxes regarding symptoms and have a patient note generated on the fly. While such a methodology works for a wide majority of patients a provider might see, it doesn’t for the one-off cases who present to the provider with certain problems and have something different going on. The author calls for a health IT products to function as decision support systems, meaning systems that allow for templating while at the same time encourage the provider to think through how a particular case might not fit the usual profile.

This study in Health Care Management Review pretty much comes down on templating. The study interviewed 78 physicians on how EMRs affect the skills of physicians. Yes, n=78 means we need to take this study with a pinch of salt, or more research is needed, but what’s revealed is pretty fascinating.

Physicians cut-and-paste too: Hey, I’m the last person to come down on using Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V. I’m doing it each time I write a blog post (albeit with attribution.) “A key dynamic with using EMRs involved the perceived ease by which a physician could use an EMR to “cut and paste” identical assessments of patients with similar clinical diagnoses or issues into several different patient records.”

It is better to get it “written” than right: Here’s something straight out of How to Write a Novel in 5 Days type self-motivation books. “The homogeneity of different patient visit notes convinced these PCPs that some physicians… favored the basic need to complete a patient EMR in a timely manner over the care management need to say something accurate and unique with regard to each individual visit.”

There’s way too much noise: Physicians interviewed recalled how specialists provided 6-8 line summaries of patients which contained everything a doctor needed to know about the patient’s visit – “[t]here was all signal, and no noise. Now as we review what specialists do in an EMR, and even what we do in primary care, what I miss is the narrative.” What you’re getting by checking a lot of boxes is copious documentation that says precious little, and makes you wade through the mire to get to the precious nuggets.

While I’m trying to poke some (I hope gentle) fun at the study’s findings, I’ve also been thinking along the lines of what features of an EMR system would help. One clue lies in the study itself: the physicians recalled how paper records forced them to dictate “certain amount of unique verbiage for transcription into a patient’s record.”

So maybe we need EMRs that:

  • combine voice recognition, so that the physician can continue to dictate patient notes
  • have Thesaurus like features to generate verbiage that at least uses interesting synonyms and phrases to give the appearance of uniqueness
  • don’t allow physicians to generate automated notes at all

What do you think will make things easier without boilerplating patient information?

About the author

Priya Ramachandran

Priya Ramachandran is a Maryland based freelance writer. In a former life, she wrote software code and managed Sarbanes Oxley related audits for IT departments. She now enjoys writing about healthcare, science and technology.

1 Comment

  • One approach that generates notes that are context/situation-specific involves a scan of the EMR for data and organizing data under user-defined headings such as Presenting Problem, Current Problem List, Symptoms/signs with Severity levels, current meds, recently retired meds, tx plan goals/objectives and progress.

    Some software systems are able to generate syntactically-correct, multi-page narratives by pulling the above from multiple forms/structured areas.

    The user can then edit for changes/augmentation and you end up with something that looks like it was dictated following a detailed study of the EMR.

    Designing narrative scripting templates takes about 5 times longer than designing an ordinary data collection forms but well worth the effort if you are doing school assessments, court reports etc.

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