The following is a guest blog post by Jennifer Della’Zanna, medical writer and online instructor for Education2Go.

During the Annual Meeting of the Office of National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (#ONC2015), one of the presenters commented that the new generation of doctors have never seen a paper chart, and they have fundamentally different views about what an electronic health record can do compared to clinicians who worked with paper charts for most of their careers. I was inclined to agree and thought it would be fun to find out what those differences are. Luckily, I have access to doctors of all ages, so I decided to conduct a very non-scientific investigation.

My first victims—er—test subjects happened to be my daughter’s pediatrician and a resident on his rotation. Who could ask for a more perfect situation to test this theory? She was a young resident, and he has been a physician since before I was born. I was surprised, therefore, to hear the same complaints about what was wrong with the electronic health record from both and no real answers for what they expected from an EHR. Neither were afraid of technology in and of itself, so I considered that factor controlled. Their complaints? The cut/paste feature allows too many errors through (and they had many real-life examples), alert fatigue, and the narrative portions are too long to scroll through. They get hung up on the mistakes and then decide they can find out more, and more quickly, if they just ask the patient for the information again.

Alright, he actually said he hated it, and she didn’t say that, but that was about the only difference. Ideas for what they’d want instead or how the technology should work? Not so much—from either one.

A trauma surgeon friend at Geisinger Medical Center in Pennsylvania recalled her experiences when they first installed an EHR in her hospital. She hated it. You have never seen such hate as when she recalls her first interactions with the system. She is a vocal sort and, eventually, the hospital said to her that they had an opportunity to customize the system to their hospital and asked if she would serve on the consulting committee. She protested that she knew nothing about computers. They told her they didn’t want somebody who knew about computers. They wanted somebody who had definite opinions about how the system could improve clinical workflow.

My friend said yes. Today, she says she can’t imagine practicing medicine without the EHR. She says it makes her a better doctor. For the record, my friend started out in a paper environment, switched to the EHR, but is not really tech savvy at all.

I checked in again with her recently and asked if she saw any real difference between how older docs and her residents use the system. She said that the older docs use it to get information, and the younger docs do things with it. “That’s the reason for the resident …read more

Source:: http://www.emrandhipaa.com/guest/2015/02/13/paper-or-electronic-does-physician-age-matter/