EMR technology can be a burden if it's not understood

Ravi Sharma, CEO of integrated medical record company 4Medica, tells Becker's Hospital Review that the biggest mistake that hospitals make when implementing electronic medical records is not understanding what needs to be done to actually take advantage of the new technology. This, in turn, can cause that technology to be a burden, rather than a boon. "[A] nurse may be taking notes by a patient's bedside into a system," Sharma says. "He or she now has to log in, go through 14 or 15 screens to find the patient's chart and enter information. The nurse is now saying ‘It used to take me less than a minute to put it on paper, and now it takes 10 minutes to put it into [the] computer.'" Q&A