We have written other blog posts that talk about the advantages and disadvantages of electronic health records (EHR) in hospitals. Many of the complaints about them are similar to those for any new electronic device. The bugs need to be found and corrected by the IT personnel. But the EHR systems have been in use for a decade now and the pervasive problems seem to persist.

A November 2016 report in the American Journal of Nursing outlines the persistent complaints from nurses about the problems of EHR systems. The complaints were divided into four categories: ease of use, patient safety, communications, and tech support.

Nurses felt that the EHR systems in their hospitals often were not useful for nurses. Up to an hour of each shift was needed for a nurse to enter data into the systems, and the systems often created difficulties in finding data or information. The report concluded that “what has been achieved . . . is the ability to transfer the task of date entry from a paper platform to an electronic platform, but the actual work of documentation is still largely manual.”

Patient safety was one of the major reasons why EHR was advocated. The use of alerts and barcodes, for example, meant fewer mistakes and missed problems. But the “cut and paste” ease of EHR sometimes means a nurse can simply repeat an earlier assessment rather than doing a time-consuming new one. The experience of nurses is that they increasingly use “workarounds” to address the flaws in the EHR systems. 67% of nurses in one study said that they had to use such “workaround” to prevent negative impact on the quality of care and avoid persistent flaws in the systems.

Communication improvement was another major reason the EHR systems were implemented. Yet a shocking 90% of nurses in a major study said that EHR did not improve communications between nurses and patients, and 94% said that also applied to communications between nurses and other members of the health care team.

Complaints about EHR tech support was endemic in hospitals. Only 30% of nurses felt their facility’s IT department responded quickly and well to problems and vulnerabilities identified by nurses. 67% of nurses working in for-profit inpatient settings felt that their IT departments were “incompetent” in fixing problems.

There is no question that EHR systems got off to a rocky start and are slowly evolving from a simple data-collection and recording systems to ones that actually assist the providers in caring for patients. As an author of the nursing report stated: “The problems . . . will fade in the next few years as increasing amounts of data are automatically populated via medical device integration, sensors, imaging, voice recognition, and so on, rather than manual entries.”