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There's a snag in the proposed meaningful use Stage 2 rule, and it concerns whether or not doctors need to be good at typing. Depending on how the final requirements for Stage 2 play out, they might have to be.
The HIT Policy Committee on Wednesday was divided over a measure in the Stage 2 rule that would allow licensed professionals or scribes to enter data into a patient’s electronic health record on behalf of a doctor.
The difficulty is this: If a doctor doesn’t enter the order, he or she will not be able to see the decision support built into the EHR system that appears at that time. Decision support is supposed to help with the prevention of medical errors and is, according to federal officials, one of the reasons for the EHR incentive program in the first place.
Most electronic health record systems only show decision support once, as the computerized physician order entry, or CPOE, is typed into a system, according to Paul Tang, MD, chief innovation and technology officer at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation and vice chair of the HIT Policy Committee. The problem is, most doctors do not type in their own orders. Nurses often enter medication orders or clerical persons type in hand written physicians’ orders, later to be “signed off on” – or approved on the computer – by the physician, often in groups of multiple orders at the end of the day.
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