Point & Click Templates

<p>This question has been a topic of discussion in many healthcare forums, raised in particular by physicians concerned that while digitization may improve productivity of healthcare, quality may have to be compromised in as far as rendering personalized care to the patients is concerned.</p><p>The office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONCHIT) and the Department of Healthcare and Human Services (HHS) will soon release a draft that will define the &ldquo;meaningful use&rdquo; in electronic health record (EHR) as outlined in the HITECH Act.</p><p>The HITECH initiative appears to have laid special emphasis on the quantitative measures for data capture of health profiles of patients rather than qualitative measures, and this has raised concerns in the minds of many healthcare providers who feel that in the long run quality of healthcare may have to be compromised.</p><p>In one of the forums a discussion was initiated to know the views of physicians on one aspect of EHR which was related to the use of point-and-click templates for documenting patient&rsquo;s records, a transition that 95% of physicians felt concerned about.</p><p>In their viewpoint, the health records should have a blend of structured and narrative information. Most of them felt that physician&rsquo;s narratives were very important in documenting the records and the utility of the templates was limited, just as speech recognition has limitations and transcription process cannot be completely automated, the templates also will not serve the desired objective.</p>