Implements

We’re “Implementing” an “Electronic Medical Record.” An electronic medical record is an exciting new way of storing your patient’s medical information in a brightly colored and incoherent and less efficient fashion. Basically it’s like hiring people who are high to do your filing.

And you aren’t high, you just wish you were because you are working 50% more hours than previously with the same pay.

Having an Electronic Medical Record is important because it is The Future. Also, because the government will pay you to have one. Also because “Meaningful Use.” Meaningful use is where you have a password and you have to try to guess it on a website and then you have to call a lady during work hours and wait for 30 minutes on hold and then authorize her to give your company $10,000 for you to use a computer, meanwhile your patients are piling up in the waiting room like so many angry ranchers in a stockyard.

If you don’t have an EMR, all of the patients will look at you like you’re incompetent dinosaurs applying leeches to wounds and diagnosing “Hysteria” and performing exorcism on patients with cirrhosis. The lab will use chisels to draw bone fragments out for analysis.

If you do have one, all of the patients will look at you like you’re a robot who cares not to look at them during the patient visit and spends most of the time in communion with the wall-mounted machine. Which communion sounds something like this: “I’d rather have a cystoscopy than use this fucking computer program!” To quote Dr. DDx.

After hours, you and your colleagues will continue to labor, bent over the keyboard, brows furrowed.

And you might take comfort, because previously you were the only one there after six.

But then it’s seven, then eight.

You overhear your colleague on the phone. “I know you need your prescription for Norco, but we’re closed. So I’m going to send it to the pharmacy using this computer…..”

Pause for 4 minutes.

“Okay, actually that didn’t work. Now I’m going to try to fax it using this computer….”

Dramatic pause for another 3.

“Okay. Screw this. You at home? I’m coming over on my bike. Be there in ten.”

And that, my friends is the Future.