According to the article, one of the causes of physician burnout and stress is the poor design and difficult use of EHR, and EHRs with high number of functions will likely lead to high stress of physicians. I think these findings support the observations on healthcare IT of Dr. John Halamka (as presented by Dr. Boonchai Kijsanayotin in his lecture), a top-down approach never works. The target end-users of the EHR must be involved in the development of the EHR, including the planning and design stage in order to avoid this problem.
According to our municipal health officer, one of the major difficulties he encountered in using the EMR is that it is time-consuming. The EMR requires many patient details to be entered in the system, especially for patients who are availing our facilities’ service for the first time. To lessen the burden on our healthcare workers during consultation, we decided to assign a different staff who will be in charge of interviewing and entering patient details of the EMR.
Another problem we had with the EMR is that it requires an internet connection. We are currently working in a temporary office because our Rural Health Unit was demolished to make way for the construction of a bigger health facility. During our first few months in the office, we had difficulty using the EMR because of poor signal in the area. Fortunately, free internet was installed soon after as part of the Free Wi-Fi for All program of the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT).