Help for ‘Internet moron’ doctors

May 14, 2009 – 2:08 pm by Chris

Current Medicine TV thinks doctors are Internet morons.

I quote from the op-ed posted there by the Healthcare Channel:

“The biggest hurdle to overcome in attempting to implement widespread electronic medical records in the U.S. will not be the pushback from doctors over the costs of the systems. That can be handled with a check from the government. The biggest hurdle will be overcoming the prevalent incompetence among most doctors when it comes to anything related to the Internet or computers. … Most doctors are unwilling to learn very basic functions of the Internet, such as how to browse a website. … The Healthcare Channel is on the frontline of this problem. Even doctors that have been guests on the channel quite often cannot figure out how to register (for free) and logon to watch their own videos. Trying to get these same overworked, underpaid, disgruntled doctors to adopt a radical new way of running their inefficient offices using electronic medical records will be next to impossible.”

I’d say there’s some disagreement out there about the Internet savvy of physicians; certainly the younger ones in love with their iPhones – as this physician blogger attests – are conversant with the Internet and see the technology as making their jobs a little easier. Here’s another example of the demand for healthcare iPhone applications, from the San Francisco Chronicle.

But I do understand there are quite a few older people out there who did not grow up with the Internet and haven’t had time to learn and don’t want to learn. In my own personal experience as a young newspaper intern, I had to assist the veteran political reporter file his stories by remote; he could never figure it out and managed to lose the story every single time until I stepped in. Up until the mid-1980s, this reporter was typing his stories on an old Remington typewriter on yellow legal paper. True story.

So how can these older physicians, who are comfortable with their paper records, become conversant with electronic health records? Perhaps the answer is as obvious as the nose on our face: focus training on the office managers.

My AARP-age mom, who is an office manager for a family physician, is the one who coordinates his schedule, makes sure the office workers are coding and filing the bills properly with the insurance companies, and has enough Internet savvy to have gotten a Facebook account. The doctor relies on her to make sure his office is running smoothly and patients are taken care of. Because she knows every regular patient in that office and what they are taking for chronic diseases, the doctor even relies on her to determine what the sample closet should be stocked with.

Real electronic health records would make her job, and the job of a lot of harried office managers, much easier – and clear out a lot of physical file space, which would improve the office layout.

So, in the push to have every doctor’s office implement electronic medical records, enlist the savvy office manager, make her or him your intermediary, and the process may become much easier. The doctors trust them, and you should trust them too.