I just ran across a nice Microsoft podcast, The New Surface Podcast Series!, by Alfred Ojukwu (@alojukwu). It reminded me of an idea I presented to some Microsoft folks years ago: What if, by using the Microsoft Surface Hub, we made the exam room the EHR?
This certainly means leaning into the EHR as the center of healthcare, rather than the patient. (I understand the marketing value for healthcare institutions to say they have “patient-centric” care. That being said, I do believe that most physicians do strive to put the patient first.)
But we all know that because of the ravenous desire for patient and physician data, healthcare institutions already put the EHR at the center of care. (For more on this take a look at some of my older posts, Is Healthcare Really a Service Industry? Has the EHR Displaced the Patient?, and Does Your Healthcare Institution Own Your Blood Pressure?)
Consider what having a large Surface Hub screen displaying an interactive EHR means to the patient-physician interaction:
- Instead of the physician looking at the patient, next at a small computer screen, then back at the patient, the physician and patient would be working together to create the patient’s EHR.
2. Also, because of the large visual display, it would be much easier to show and discuss health trends, imaging results, and relationships to other data sets.
3. And, just think, if Microsoft had hub-friendly EHR software, then both the physician and the patient could physically engage with the patient’s chart.
Now, without a doubt, most COOs will initially balk at the cost: Why spend $20,000 on a large screen? ( I think this is because they don’t really understand how far away the EHR is from being a seamless tool for physician-patient interaction, and what closing this gap this means for efficiency and quality of care.)
However, I don’t think the cost is the real barrier. I think to make this work, healthcare institutions need to accept that they have placed the EHR at the center of care—something which has resulted in significant dehumanization of both patient and physician. That’s a big conceptual lift for healthcare executives, but one which is necessary if they want to replace EHR-centric care with the triad of EHR-patient-physician care.