The motivation for this post is a series of discussions I’ve had with colleagues over the past few weeks involving the potential for electronic health/medical records (EHRs or EMRs) for improving clinical care and their utility for research. All of these conversations have been in the context of how we use clinical data to better record and understand patient’s state, trajectories, treatments/interventions, adverse events and outcomes. In this post, I discuss an example of how EHRs are used in a workflow for clinical practice and highlight opportunities for improving EHRs.
From my perspective, a central theme is how given a set of available tools (including an EHR), my workflow in clinical practice includes work-arounds and routines analogous to what Herbert Simon called “satisficing” – finding satisfactory (often sub-optimal) solutions to account for the realities of the environment.
Full post here
