This morning, FORTUNE and Kaiser Health News published a report on our months-lengthy investigation into electronic fitness data (EHRs), which you may study right here. With the aid of two exceptional healthcare journalists inside the commercial enterprise—FORTUNE’s Erika Fry and KHN’s Fred Schulte—it is almost 10,000 words. When you get began, I’m pretty sure you’re going to need to read each ultimate one of them. Indeed, that is one of the top compelling, sudden, and deeply traumatic stories approximately our healthcare system that I’ve studied in an extended, long term.
It’s additionally one of the functions I’m maximum proud to have posted as FORTUNE’s Editor-in-Chief. While, at first glance, the subject count number—your electronic clinical charts—would possibly appear to be the stuff of an eye-fixed-glazing white paper, this is a story that at once touches you and your loved ones. It’s about what occurs on your accurate records. At the same time, you visit the health practitioner or medical institution—and approximately the unseen (and too often glitchy) technology that may affect the care you get, without ever being the wiser. This same technology—the EHR—additionally represents the single most considerable practice trade for docs because of the advent of the HMO, and it’s a massive contributor to every other, regularly hidden, crisis in medication today: the epidemic of physician burnout. Doctors today spend a mean of 5. Nine hours of each workday handling digital health data, consistent with 2017 take a look at inside the Annals of Family Medicine.
That’s nicely greater than they spend with patients. (As loopy as that sounds, the statistics are sponsored up using other research, including this 2016 observe published within the Annals of Internal Medicine. Or you can ask any medical doctor you realize to present you an estimate of what they spend on these structures, and what kind of-of that point is simply simply wasted.) Earlier this yr, Medscape published a survey it performed with 15,000 medical doctors on their reviews with burnout and despair.
