[smallerdemon]

Having worked in IT supporing doctors, nurses, scientists, and academics for the last 23 years, in all honesty, it doesn't matter what they would have chosen it would have resulting in a percentage of them complaining. Doctors like change that they control and understand, such as research leading to new treatments and improved patient outcomes. They do NOT like having their workflows challenged, though. They have very specific prescriptive actions that they live by, and again, they only like changing those when it benefits them in some tangible way. EHRs benefit their -institutions- in tangible ways, not them. EHRs benefit billing, administrative, regulatory departments more than they benefit providers... in the eyes of the providers.

I work at an institution made up of components institutions, many of which use their own independent EHR systems. What doctors LIKE are the ones they get used to in their residency, fellowships, and first years in practice. Older doctors coming from paper straight to ANY EHR will struggle without extensive assistance from their support staff. Nurses rarely get support staff, and usually ARE the support staff to a provider in addition to their nursing duties. The overall feeling I get, though, is that most of them that have used Epic like it. Cerner as well. Some others in the institution like Meditech, less so (due to largely archaic interfaces dressed up with some more current UI). But Epic and Cerner are the big players in the game. There are many, many others, and in the end what ends up mattering is the support staff for the EHR both local and vendor. One we use has gone to a lot of off-shore tier 2 and tier 3 support staff lately, and it truly is a struggle in unforeseeable ways (such as terrible telecom infrastructure making it often impossible to communicate with vendor support staff). They are all focused on new customers and growth and then maintaining the customers, and it certainly makes you feel like an afterthought as a standing customer.

[akira2501]

> What doctors LIKE are the ones they get used to in their residency, fellowships, and first years in practice.

From observing a family member implement these systems, I'd say that what doctors like is an administration that's willing to listen to their specific complaints and then get the changes or some subset of them implemented in the system. There's often a fair amount of customization that can even be done at the customer level to achieve this.

Seemingly, too many institutional administrators fall in love with the sales pitch and then are demoralized into acrimony when their doctors don't just automatically feel the same way on the roll out day.

[belmarca]

I have also worked in healthcare IT and while user input is obviously essential for building an efficient and useful solution, too much of it can be a kiss of death.

[quijoteuniv]

Organizational changes come with resistance in all fields but if your doctor & nurses go out in the streets and say : people is likely going to die because of this, maybe is time to hear out.

[conductr]

I can echo this with about as much time in the industry. I've seen it from most angles. As a clinician, they hate change and the software is usually clunky and slower than paper. So they dislike it. As senior management, when we poll nurses, since they have all worked elsewhere recently given turnover is just naturally high, they prefer Epic by a wide margin. But they still complain and need constant training (turnover, implementation specific quirks, and so on). It's very similar to an ERP. It's a large complex application that is pretty expensive and many people will use and nobody will like.

[Scoundreller]

> One we use has gone to a lot of off-shore tier 2 and tier 3 support staff lately

Does the company name begin with an A, before and after?

[matheusmoreira]

> What doctors LIKE are the ones they get used to in their residency, fellowships, and first years in practice.

"Like" is too strong a word here. People simply get used to these terrible systems. They learn how to work around the annoyances. They come to tolerate them as facts of life that they have no control over.