Electronic Record Keeping

[seinfeld]

The hospital has finally put money in the capital budget for an AIMS. We are previewing many different systems. I would like to get as much feedback from people who are using systems already as to ease of use, bugs in the software. I am especially interested in 2 sets of peoples comments. My more senior and distinguished colleagues who have switched over from paper and the ease of transition and the new CA-1s who are learning.

thanks

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[loveumms]

We switched over to an electronic medical record when I was a CA-2. We use surginet which is a cerner product. At first, it was difficult to learn and everyone hated it (probably more because people resist change versus the actual system).

Personally, I love the product. Of course there are certain glitches that are annoying but, overall it makes my life so much easier. We rotated through a hospital that doesn't use the EMR and it was painful. Made you appreciate how easy EMR make everyday life.

 

[proman]

I'd vote for Metavision. But it really depends on how you decide to customize it. I've used Metavision at a place that did a poor job of customizing it, and one place that did a great job. It's really quite good if you put the right people in charge of it.

Stay away from Innovian, it's terrible.

 

[DrBeaker]

Few places at my institution use Innovian. Not as good as what we use at the main OR. Centricity is the name of that program I think. It was fairly easy to learn. I haven't used any other EMR. What is paper charting?

 

[diceksox]

We use centricity as well, works pretty well and is fairly user friendly.

 

[jope]

We use PICIS Anesthesia manager. Though it is a bit clunky and half the staff here end up using paper charts. I like not having to chart vitals though!

 

[MTGas2B]

I've lived through three institutions transitioning to electronic records. Two hospitals in my training program went to Docusys. Of course it happened at different times and each hospital decided to do things differently. And of course staff were equally clueless for each transition.

Where I work now we went from paper to innovian just after I showed up. I had used innovian at the VA hospital where I trained, so not as painful.

Innovian is nice because its a Draeger product and talks nice to the machines. One of the biggest problems I've seen is getting the record keeper program to talk to the hospital's EMR. That was a big issue with our docusys transition, and with my current gig we still print the record from innovian and put it in a paper chart. 😱

I haven't been involved in the nuts and bolts of a transition, just an end user, but in comparing innovian vs docusys, innovian seems to a be better off the shelf. Docusys required lots more tinkering to get things working correctly.

I haven't used the cerner product, but direct integration with the hospital EMR could be a huge savings, but those I know who have looked at it and really didn't like the interface.

 

[imfrankie]

The hospital has finally put money in the capital budget for an AIMS. We are previewing many different systems. I would like to get as much feedback from people who are using systems already as to ease of use, bugs in the software. I am especially interested in 2 sets of peoples comments. My more senior and distinguished colleagues who have switched over from paper and the ease of transition and the new CA-1s who are learning.

thanks

Have used Centricity and Cerner. Both are fine. We are getting ready to switch to Epic. I'll let you know.

 

[pgg]

I've used Innovian since day 1 of my CA1 year. It had an easy learning curve as a beginner. The system was literally brand new to the hospital that July. Most of the attendings making the paper to computer transition said they hated it. I'm sure that was a combination of change-resistance and install issues / growing pains.

The system works fine, and with the environments set up right it's reasonably user friendly. I definitely prefer it to paper.

A couple of my gripes about it -

There's no way for individual users to customize it. I'm stuck with some global options and layout decisions other people prefer. Every case it takes me 2-3 minutes to un-customize those settings and polish the record, else it prints out what I consider a turd. For example, someone set the thing to alphabetize drugs and vitals which makes the charts hard to read later. Also, printing every case strikes me as about as crazy as printing email. It totally misses the point.

It does not play nice with other record systems. We have tried and utterly failed to get it to import demographic data from the scheduling system, which was a promised and advertised feature. It won't import data from our inpatient or outpatient charting system. It won't talk to the lab's system.

 

[TrustMe]

We use the PICIS Anesthesia Manager. It was already in place when I started so fewer growing pains for me with regards to learning it. It does have it's glitches every now and then, but overall I like it. We are currently working to integrate it to the EMR so we are still printing a copy to put in the pt's chart. I am told that that aspect is going away soon. They have managed to start automatically generating an electronic billing sheet that incorporates everything from the case (ASA status, lines, blocks, etc.) so no paper billing sheet is required.

 

[proman]

A major issue I had with Innovian is that when the system froze (which it did on a regular basis, on the Drager computers) you lost the data during the time it took to reboot, about 10 minutes. Manually entering vitals isn't an issue, but that kind of flaw I think really bad. With Metavision the data is all there. The worst aspect of Metavision is that you are able to pull data from another room, which would mean charting on another patient. Not a great thing.