Fam Pract Manag. 2013;20(1):9-10
The implementation of electronic health records (EHRs) has been a huge burden for physicians. “The 2012 EHR User Satisfaction Survey: Responses From 3,088 Family Physicians” [November/December 2012] is a helpful resource for physicians. However, the process of sorting through hundreds of different systems in order to find the best one is overwhelming. I suspect that most of us have purchased systems that will be extinct within the next five years. Since the government wants to mandate EHR use, perhaps they should develop a quality system and provide it to us. The current process of having hundreds of different systems and then trying to get them to communicate with one another will never work well, if it works at all, and will cost billions of dollars more than setting up a single unified system.