Inside STAT: How the EMR has become a third wheel in the doctor-patient relationship

The electronic medical record, or EMR, has a lot going for it. It helps to streamline the collection of hundreds of thousands of data points for patients so that larger, population-level trends can be quickly — and accurately — identified. At the same time, it has fundamentally changed the doctor-patient relationship, especially for general physicians. Instead of spending much time making eye contact or speaking directly with their patients, doctors are now forced to wrestle with sometimes finicky software and spend an average of six hours each day on data entry. EMRs are a vast improvement on the paper charts of yesteryear, Dr. Danielle Ofri writes in a new First Opinion for STAT, but their future, at least in daily interactions, is still being looked at with caution. Read more here.