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Sue C. Mitchell
  • Female
  • Fontana, CA
  • United States
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Sue C. Mitchell is now a member of Health Informatics Forum
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March 30, 2009

Profile Information

What is your Health Informatics Role?
LCSW - Licensed Clinical Social Worker
About Me:
Recently retired from social work, I am interested in the transition from a paper-generated practice for MDs to a
EMR/EHR. My interest springs from two areas, one is that I am an aging person who likely will need more and more physician assistance with my healthcare in the future. As a patient I have concerns about the EMR/EHR.

The second springs from a love of medical transcription that I developed as a young woman before becoming a social worker. It has been a lifelong love, an art , if you will, skillfully developed over time, and has served me well both personally and in my profession.

I have had several experiences on a personal level with my own physician (general practitioner) refuting, with an error, your assumption that templates increase the doctor's accuracy. Unfortunately, I had the unpleasant task of calling my pharmacist after an e-prescription was filled and picked up to see why I was given a drug normally prescribed for seizure disorders when I was supposed to get a medication in the category of an antibiotic. The answer was alarming.. My physician had checked the wrong box in a drop-down list on his computerized template of prescriptions. The only correlation was both medications started with the letter K.

Again, unfortunately for me, that same week my pharmacy also switched 2 separate medications with the wrong label on the wrong bottle with the wrong medication in each bottle, a system also generated by a computer.

Computers are wonderful, and I am on mine daily doing a number of fantastic tasks. However, computers cannot think , much less think critically. There are a number of doctors being penalized for "garbage in/garbage out" types of errors. One pathologist doing two separate autopsies, one on a female and one on a male, got his notes mixed up and dictated the wrong sex and those reports were signed and sent out, then correct ed, and resent, and still had a number of errors that would have been caught by a professional medical transcriptionist who is not "just a typist" but a professional language specialist . Every day across the nation MTs hear these kinds of errors, wrong sex, wrong medical record number, wrong report work type, all of which get corrected at the MTs own expense since he/she is only paid by production line. Demographics are a "given" in the field of MTs. If something is wrong you do not continue to generate a report until the error can be identified, researched, double checked, and then generated. The cost of these transcriptionist fees have been overinflated by almost all Technology salesmen who continue to sell their technology as infrastructure cost replacement.

As a consequence, most MTs are being "transitioned" to Medical Record Editors and given one-half the pay per line because they are said by the salesment to be able to produce twice the production lines in half the time. I cannot emphasize enough how many varibles will be needed to make that happen. So far, they are looking for other jobs by the droves. This loss will be felt down the line, and it may be too late to recover their skills by then.

Voice recognition (better known in the MT world as voice wreakognition) has reached a fever level of pitch to doctors, clinics, hospitals, and even our military service. This proliferation of commercial applications has been fueled by the goal of have an EMR/EHR in place by 2010. For more discerning professionals in our allied health fields the identification of which of these commercial applications can deliver their main objective, which is to enable physicians to free up more time for patients, deliver a safer healthcare visit for patients, increase quality of care, increase accuracy while delivering cost-reduction in the health care system, is not an easy task.

For example, salesmen have been known to tell our physicians that their technology is "100 percent accurate right out of the box." We need to examine the fine print when it comes to these sales pitches.

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