92 Percent of Nurses Are Dissatisfied with Electronic Health Records

Although we have discussed their dissatisfaction with electronic health records, hospitals and physicians are not the only victims of the federal government’s $30 billion adventure in underwriting poor IT investments. Nurses are almost uniformly disappointed in EHRs, according to a new survey by Black Book Market Research:

Dissatisfaction with inpatient electronic health record systems among nurses has escalated to an all time high of 92%, according to the Q3 2014 Black Book EHR Loyalty survey results to be published later this month. Disruption in productivity and workflow has also negatively influenced job dissatisfaction according to nurses in 84% of US Hospitals. 85% of nurses state they are struggling with continually flawed EHR systems and 88% blame financial administrators and CIOs for selecting low perfomance systems based on EHR pricing, government incentives and cutting corners at the expense of quality of care.. 84% of nursing administrators in not-for-profit hospitals, and 97% of nursing administrators in for-profit hospitals confirm that the impact on nurses’ workloads including the efficient flow of direct patient care duties were not considered highly enough in their administration’s final EHR selection decision.

Allow me to point out that even nurses working on the front lines of health care, who should be too busy taking care of patients to concern themselves with the goings on of politicians and bureaucrats, are aware that “government incentives” are a major cause of the problems that they face dealing with EHRs every day.

The federal financing of bad investment in EHRs is coming to an end. Soon, hospitals and physicians’ offices will be “ripping and replacing” the EHRs that the government bribed them to implement. As long as the government does not insert itself into the process again, the next generation of EHRs will be implemented based on patients’ needs instead of government’s priorities.

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For the pivotal alternative to Obamacare, please see the Independent Institute’s widely acclaimed book: Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, by John C. Goodman.