[d12345m]

Ex-healthcare IT data person weighing in with a probably ridculous idea:

The focus on NLP is because in 20-30 years, discrete data won't be entered into EMRs by providers at all.

Here's the pitch: Providers hate EMRs. They begrudge the time they spend working in EMRs instead of focusing on patient care. They loathe spending their office hours working on documentation. They hate spending their time in meetings with IT staff talking about EMR workflows and form-building. They hate getting lectured by accounting staff about how their documentation affects billing. They couldn't care less about this stuff and in an ideal (or even just a slightly more efficient) world, they wouldn't have to.

Every EMR that depends on webform-like inputs that map to database fields is going to be seen as a roadblock to patient care, which is what providers see as their primary concern.

I think the focus on NLP makes a ton of sense if you frame the problem with EMRs that way. EMR software will continue to be the bane of providers' existence right up to the day that providers can simply talk to their EMR in whatever way they want and have the computer interpret their speech and reliably spit out the discrete data that the accountants and number-crunchers want.

Obviously, I'm talking about a monumentally complicated undertaking and it's a bit on the ridiculous side. But I honestly believe we're going to go there, if only because providers won't be happy until we do.

[kayadx83]

As someone who works in healthcare clinically and also is a product designer, I agree with some certain parts of your idea. It would certainly help providers. While you are right that providers might not like documentation and filling out forms, other staffs like nursing hates typing reports. Getting rid of forms would lengthen nursing documentation which would directly delay patient care more than providers having to fill out forms. Delaying nursing care would stagnate patient flow which directly impacts hospital's bottom line. Furthermore, there are quality metrics and other stats hospitals measure that the cost of getting wrong would be more than the cost of spending a little extra to get it right since it affects ratings etc. Hospitals are too risk averse so how widely they depend on NLP would be questionable. What we need is better designers to design the EHRs better to actually fit the reality of operations. A lot of times you have hospital admins making decisions on form designs without understanding usability so you end up with horrible forms.

I don't think EHRs are going away anytime soon because of their strong integration and impact on hospital operations. I would love for Amazon to partner with existing EHR companies but those companies tend not to be very open with their applications. If anything, Amazon can use this as a way to get into the EHR business and slowly take away the operational control EHRs have over hospitals.

[rficcaglia]

Operational control EHRs have over hospitals is because of executive level dysfunction. I have personally seen large Epic sites where the CxOs had never actually used Epic hands on before forcing it upon the staff and spending well over $100M on implementing it. Later when they saw the 40 clicks it took just to create an encounter and heard disgruntled providers complaints, they were stunned (too late).

[g10r]

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha...

:)