[kayadx83]

As someone who works in healthcare clinically and also is a product designer, I agree with some certain parts of your idea. It would certainly help providers. While you are right that providers might not like documentation and filling out forms, other staffs like nursing hates typing reports. Getting rid of forms would lengthen nursing documentation which would directly delay patient care more than providers having to fill out forms. Delaying nursing care would stagnate patient flow which directly impacts hospital's bottom line. Furthermore, there are quality metrics and other stats hospitals measure that the cost of getting wrong would be more than the cost of spending a little extra to get it right since it affects ratings etc. Hospitals are too risk averse so how widely they depend on NLP would be questionable. What we need is better designers to design the EHRs better to actually fit the reality of operations. A lot of times you have hospital admins making decisions on form designs without understanding usability so you end up with horrible forms.

I don't think EHRs are going away anytime soon because of their strong integration and impact on hospital operations. I would love for Amazon to partner with existing EHR companies but those companies tend not to be very open with their applications. If anything, Amazon can use this as a way to get into the EHR business and slowly take away the operational control EHRs have over hospitals.

[rficcaglia]

Operational control EHRs have over hospitals is because of executive level dysfunction. I have personally seen large Epic sites where the CxOs had never actually used Epic hands on before forcing it upon the staff and spending well over $100M on implementing it. Later when they saw the 40 clicks it took just to create an encounter and heard disgruntled providers complaints, they were stunned (too late).