Is Cerner a Garbage EMR?

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cbrons said:
?

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I don't have much experience with Epic but use Citrix at my hospital and people complain about it and praise EPIC. Curious about this as well.


The CIS program is hard to understand. It's confusing because there are multiple ways to find the same thing. Wanna know the BP? It's in the summary page, in the last ClinDoc note, in ResultsReview, or in DocumentsView, or you can also find it in the Interventional Cardiology (?!?) tab. Still not exactly sure where to find everything and to add patients to your service after surgery you hit sign out?? Just a lot of weird things about it and it's not intuitive. No idea about epic.


Quick Google search: most seem to be more positive with epic including allnurses.com

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Yes it sucks. I had epic as an intern and on a few rotations as a resident. My primary hospital in residency uses cerner. I've learned to use cerner fairly efficiently but its ugly and less refined. I would prefer to dictate notes regardless, especially outpatient.
 
dadaddadaBATMAN said:
Yes. Although there are worse things out there.
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Meditech

dumpsters.jpg
 
I have used both. I like Cerner slightly more than EPIC. I dont think it makes a huge difference because at the end of the day your hospital or department will dictate how the service is run anyway and that will be the limiting factor.
 
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cbrons said:
Its not epic. Epic is clean, and i can make dot phrases which allows me to write notes in 2 mins.

Cerner is ugly and awkward and stinks and i hate it

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Eh, I have plenty of dot phrases for Cerner. I can't share them with co-residents like Epic. But we have shared templates for H&Ps, consults, progress notes, discharge summaries, etc, and I just fill in stuff with my dot phrases. It takes me an equal amount of time to write a note for both. Epic is easier for order input.

The real key is having the same EMR for inpatient and outpatient. Currently, my residency program uses one EMR for outpatient, and separate EMRs for each hospital we rotate at (VA, university [Cerner], 2 community hospitals[one Epic, one Cerner]). So patient notes are scattered across multiple EMRs. Incredibly annoying.
 
My previous hospital just decided on moving to epic over cerner, although it sounds like there were a lot of votes for cerner. One thing to keep in mind is that institutions do seem to have quite a bit of leeway how the EMR system wis built and customized which probably plays into how well it works for people.

current shop has meditech connected to some other system. wasn't a fan 8 yrs ago when I first saw it. still not a fan now.
 
Cerner is worse than my Step score. It completely and utterly blows. You're better off using paper charts
 
My med school had Cerner for inpatient and Epic for outpatient. Not only was Cerner annoying to use, it was also annoying that we would have to separately open Epic if we wanted to see outpatient notes. You could make dot phrases in Cerner but it wasn't as user-friendly as Epic is.

My residency is all Epic and it's great. So much easier to use. Also I love my Deep Space theme 😀
 
Ismet said:
My med school had Cerner for inpatient and Epic for outpatient. Not only was Cerner annoying to use, it was also annoying that we would have to separately open Epic if we wanted to see outpatient notes. You could make dot phrases in Cerner but it wasn't as user-friendly as Epic is.

My residency is all Epic and it's great. So much easier to use. Also I love my Deep Space theme 😀
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Did you go to school in Chicago?
 
Epic is a terrible emr. Most med students encounter it as their first emr and therefore they think it's awesome as med students are wont to believe they know everything about something after they experience it for the first time.

Cerner is better.

The best emr ever made is CPRS. Fast simple efficient. None of the bloat bs the plagues epic.
 
atomi said:
Epic is a terrible emr. Most med students encounter it as their first emr and therefore they think it's awesome as med students are wont to believe they know everything about something after they experience it for the first time.

Cerner is better.

The best emr ever made is CPRS. Fast simple efficient. None of the bloat bs the plagues epic.
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CPRS has infinite data mining capacity too
 
I've used both. I actually prefer Cerner to Epic slightly since I found it a bit less taxing to find data in Cerner compared to Epic. Of course Cerner is the EHR my residency uses so I'm a bit biased.
 
cbrons said:
Its not epic. Epic is clean, and i can make dot phrases which allows me to write notes in 2 mins.

Cerner is ugly and awkward and stinks and i hate it

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Epic is only as good as a health system designs it to be. I've seen gorgeous implementations of it running miles away from hideous ones. Every build of epic is basically custom designed from the ground up, with things as basic as UI elements changed in position and function for the system's needs. This is a big part of why epic is so expensive to implement, and why you'll find some mixed opinions as to how good it is as an EMR.
 
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Mad Jack said:
Epic is only as good as a health system designs it to be. I've seen gorgeous implementations of it running miles away from hideous ones. Every build of epic us basically custom designed from the ground up, with things as basic as UI elements changed in position and function for the system's needs. This is a big part of why epic is so expensive to implement, and why you'll find some mixed opinion as to how good it is as an EMR.
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Ur only as good as ur mom

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Are you guys on drugs, those folks who like Cerner? I can’t even fathom how you guys can call it superior unless there’s some fancier and more user friendly version I haven’t seen

Cerner is like MS DOS in comparison to Epic. Functionality is far far more user friendly in EPIC. This is as someone who has used both. My workflow got 200% more efficient with Epic. Writing notes, orders/order sets, and viewing labs/discharge summaries is just disgusting by comparison in Cerner
 
Mad Jack said:
Epic is only as good as a health system designs it to be. I've seen gorgeous implementations of it running miles away from hideous ones. Every build of epic us basically custom designed from the ground up, with things as basic as UI elements changed in position and function for the system's needs. This is a big part of why epic is so expensive to implement, and why you'll find some mixed opinion as to how good it is as an EMR.
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Yeah I will say our EPIC system was designed very nicely for our needs (though not perfectly) so pulling up data relevant for us and writing notes is much easier for me
 
Mad Jack said:
Epic is only as good as a health system designs it to be. I've seen gorgeous implementations of it running miles away from hideous ones. Every build of epic us basically custom designed from the ground up, with things as basic as UI elements changed in position and function for the system's needs. This is a big part of why epic is so expensive to implement, and why you'll find some mixed opinion as to how good it is as an EMR.
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Can confirm. Our EPIC buildout is absolute trash, and people have been begging to switch back to Cerner (still used at most other sites) for years.

If your institution skimps on the build-out, you get a windows XP looking pile of junk that has buttons that don’t work, freezes constantly, and will mix up dot phrases making them useless.
 
Cerner was fine for everything except billing when I used it. Trying to code my damn encounters made me want to kill someone with that. CPRS by comparison is a breeze in that regard, though we obviously code for different reasons at the VA.

Though god help us when Epic finally replaces CPRS. The entire VA health system will grind to a halt.
 
atomi said:
Epic is a terrible emr. Most med students encounter it as their first emr and therefore they think it's awesome as med students are wont to believe they know everything about something after they experience it for the first time.

Cerner is better.

The best emr ever made is CPRS. Fast simple efficient. None of the bloat bs the plagues epic.
Click to expand...
I thought Epic was mediocre at best until I encountered AllScripts, then I realized Epic was great.
 
Cerner is trash. It’s basically a $500,000 computer virus.
 
failedatlife said:
Cerner is worse than my Step score. It completely and utterly blows. You're better off using paper charts
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Having done paper charts and Cerner and EPIC, I will say that Cerner is better than complete paper charts.

It really depends on the build. I’ve seen multiple builds of both Cerner and EPIC. EPIC is slightly more intuitive and most things are fairly easy to find. Cerner has more freedom for formatting. The version of Cerner I’m using now is leagues ahead of the one I had in residency, but there are little quirks about it I don’t like (all the forms the nurses fill out end up as notes? Like WTF...). It gets the job done, though, and I can easily breeze through a note.
 
God I thought failedatlife came back for a second and got really excited

Some programs use epic as their main EMR and use a pile of trash for their anesthesia manager when Epic has a beautiful built in anesthesia section. Cheap as hell.
 
Used Cerner in med school and Epic now that I’m a resident.

Epic sucks in many ways. Cerner sucks a lot more.

Epic is a lot cleaner and a little more intuitive than Cerner.

That said, Epic makes me want to throw a computer out the window at least once a week.
 
Mad Jack said:
Epic is only as good as a health system designs it to be. I've seen gorgeous implementations of it running miles away from hideous ones. Every build of epic us basically custom designed from the ground up, with things as basic as UI elements changed in position and function for the system's needs. This is a big part of why epic is so expensive to implement, and why you'll find some mixed opinion as to how good it is as an EMR.
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This. 5 of the hospitals I rotated through in med school had Epic, and each had fairly different builds which varied considerably in quality. It has the potential to be amazing or an absolute piece of crap.

Soarian though...+pissed+
 
I like Epic, as do the residents I've worked with.

Most of the attendings have adjusted perfectly well to Epic. The only ones still complaining are the same attendings who cannot work PowerPoint or turn on a projector. Pretty difficult to take them seriously when they complain about the EMR...
 
An important point is that the version and modules purchased makes all of the difference between EMRs/CPOEs like Cerner and Epic. Both are actually considered Cadillac tier, it just depends on the options you go with when it comes to Cerner. Epic is superior and more user friendly on the whole, though.

Similarly, the biggest appliance of MediTech is HCA, and even at some of their giant centers they use a laughably outdated version (they may use the same version everywhere, I’ve only practiced in one large HCA academic affiliate hospital).

In general, EMRs are terribly designed from a GUI standpoint. It’s a joke, and since we are legally obligated to use them (meaningful use), there is little motivation for the free market to improve their quality. It’s a sad state of inefficient affairs.
 
EMRs are great for data geeks like me in clinical research or quality type areas, but man I feel sorry for people who actually have to use them for documenting patient care with the way they are currently set up. Watching the nurses chart stuff is painful.

As noted above, it really does come down to the build and if the hospital system isn't willing or able to put in the time, effort, and resources to do it well you're going to end up with a mess thats not at all user friendly.

I've been in two systems with Epic, one with Cerner, and one with Meditech. I thought the first two were fine for my purposes but our meditech build was atrocious. I heard from another site they really liked their meditech and couldn't figure out why everyone else hated it so much. I explained in detail why and they had none of our issues. Turns out they had an in house IT guru with some solid clinical experience on their build team and thanks to him having quite a bit of experience with different EMRs and builds, they were able to do a really good job.
 
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