Electronic Health Records I

After seeing the computer systems at different hospitals, I realize there's a lot of inefficient systems out there. I know electronic health records have to do a lot: synchronization of data, privacy protection, compatibility of different interfaces, administrative and billing capabilities, ability to pull up radiology films, etc. But what I see is the user interface and almost every system I've used has been extraordinarily user-unfriendly. Some hospitals don't even have a graphical user interface (GUI); their systems are entirely text-based. You don't even use a mouse. It looks like DOS (the old Disk Operating System from IBM in the 1980s and 1990s). Unbelievable!

Even at UCSF-affiliated hospitals, most systems are unwieldy. There are problems that simply should not exist. For example, I have to click a ridiculous number of times to look at labs and they're not organized logically (why split up calcium, magnesium, and phosphorus? How come all the liver function tests aren't together?). When looking at a bunch of radiology tests, I have to click on one, click back, click on the next one; there should just be a "next" button to move directly to the next film. Furthermore, even the infrastructure is unwieldy. It takes the program at SFGH at least several minutes to open. I can't alt-tab back and forth from internet explorer or word. Some but not all notes are on the system. It's frustrating.