Reply To: Week 4 Topic 1 : Health Inforamtion Exchange

[Ching To Chung]

I am slightly surprised about this finding. I think it is important what we compare it to. Before adopting the EMR, healthcare workers still have to document everything on paper, which is even more time consuming, writing things down and sorting through paper files. I think by standardizing some of the input fields, EMR already helped save time for documentation. I have some friends working in the medical field, and I personally have not heard of them complaining about the system. For them, the burnout mostly comes from the stress and the amount of patients they have to handle (Hong Kong has a serious shortage of nurses and doctors). Some of them even thinks working on the EMR gives them the “resting time” they need outside of clinical work. However, I still understand that not all EMR systems have good designs and some are especially cumbersome to use and navigate, or ask for too much information. An advice I have would be to collect the feedback from front-line workers, and ask them about the sources of inconvenience from using the system. The system could then be revised accordingly. Perhaps there could also be the integration of generative AI to help fill in long texts.