Putting lipstick on a pig

Danny Lieberman
2 min readApr 20, 2021
Courtesy of Yaron Koler — a liver cancer survivor and software engineer

4 reasons why electronic health record systems need to go

Reason #1 — Electronic health record systems in the US are a burden instead of a productivity tool for physicians.

When you have a non-value added activity or an activity with negative ROI, the first thing to do is to eliminate it. A policy started by the Obama administration of stimulating adoption of electronic health records created a Golem who destroyed his creator.

For every 8 hours of scheduled patient time, ambulatory physicians spend more than 5 hours on the EHR... While audit logs remain a powerful tool for understanding physician EHR use, additional transparency, granularity, and standardization of vendor-derived EHR use data definitions are still necessary to standardize EHR use measurement.

See Characterizing physician EHR use with vendor derived data: a feasibility study and cross-sectional analysis

Reason #2 — Privacy, privacy and privacy

Centralized EHR systems deployed on leaky hospital networks are ripe targets for attackers. Google EHR security breaches returns 200,000 hits. I’ve written in the past here and here about the vulnerabilities in EHR systems and little has changed in the past 9 years since my first post.

Reason #3 — Most of our clinical data is now outside the EHR

The world of real-world clinical data is exploding. The variety, volume and velocity of real-world clinical data is growing exponentially. Our clinical data is being generated all the time, by multiple sources at varying times. The result is an endless body of data, unsynchronized in place, time and doctor visits.

The wearable healthcare technology market is surging, and its maturation will put more devices in the hands of consumers and US businesses. According to Business Insider Intelligence research, the total installed base of fitness tracker and health-based wearables in the US will grow at an annualized rate of 10% to surpass 120 million by 2023.

Reason #4 — The consumer experience is what counts not a Bolshevik EHR system of record-keeping

Digital health apps/digital therapeutics and connected wearable devices are part of our lives. As consumers, we expect our product vendors to design, implement and validate their product for a great consumer experience.

These apps and connected devices generate large volumes of real-world clinical data. We have barely scratched the surface of how this clinical data can improve our lives and the performance of drugs and devices.

It’s no wonder that customers have stopped asking us about EHR. integration with our clinical data management and automated detection and response platform.

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Danny Lieberman

Helping people do their best work, at any age, at any time with AI.