I've had a fair amount of experience using Cerner/Powerchart, Epic, Compurecord, PICIS, and another one I do not remember that looked like Fisher Price designed it.
Your institutions individual configuration matters a lot in regards to dictating your experience with the EMR. I have used the same EMR at two separate institutions and aside from the general look of the GUI they couldn't have been more different. A lot of it comes down to who has control over the initial configuration process. One institution I worked at was part of a four hospital health system where the ambulatory center wielded the most power. Their anesthesia department dictated how the periop EMR was structured in regards to macros and button layout. This resulted in the record being extremely burdensome in the more academic trauma center where I was working. Things like a-lines, central lines, blood administration were buried deeply in menu trees because these were things rarely, if ever, done at the center that dictated how the EMR was configured.
Of all of them, I found Epic the most difficult to use, but it also required the least work to start the record and populated the most information coming into the OR and leaving to go to the PACU. I also did not like the layout of the anesthesia record it exported into the patient's chart, but that may be another configuration issue.
Cerner was the second most difficult. I found that half of my time in the OR was clicking all these cute icons to throw into the chart to document essentially any event that happened in the OR, this was burdensome even when I was comfortable using the system. It also populated the patient's demographics well but not as thoroughly as epic. It produced an easier to read anesthetic record than epic but with many walls of text.
PICIS was probably the lowest quality EMR I used. It requires a lot of clicking and depends extensively on how it is initially configured regarding how much clicking vs. typing is involved. It populated patient demographics fairly thoroughly and transported decently between care settings. Overall though it feels very thrown together and low quality, but it is not too burdensome to use.
CompuRecord was likely my favorite but also required the most work. Our setup populated 0 patient demographics so it was literally like a paper chart on the computer. However, because of this it was extremely customizable and it was easy to chart basically anything you wanted. Of all the records I used, it required the most data entry and typing, but it was an extremely open system so I found it worth the investment. However, in how turnover settings it was very burdensome because of how reliant it was on me entering the demographics. It produced by far the easiest to read anesthesia record into the patient's chart.
The Fisher Price one was by far the easiest I have ever used but also the one I understood the least. It was used in a very high turnover facility with a lot of older attendings, so I think it was designed to be as simple as possible. When you booted up you were basically presented with a patient list, selected the patient, and then there were two buttons: start case and standby. Once you started you were presented with three buttons asking general ETT, general LMA, Mac. I don't think there were ever more than 5 buttons total on the screen. They were very large and cartoonish and would be things like a picture of a syringe for induction, a large pill to document meds etc. It was probably the record I learned the quickest, but to this day I don't think I understand what was happening with it.
I agree that for high turnover, few things can beat paper charting.
