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athenahealth, ZDoggMD fight bad EHR design

Monday, athenahealth, with the help of Dr. Zubin Damania’s rapping alter-ego, ZDoggMD, launched “Let Doctors Be Doctors,” which is part platform for doctors to demand better EHRs and, let’s face it, part athenahealth marketing campaign.

By Neil Versel on October 19, 2015

Two of health IT’s most outspoken figures, athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush and Turntable Health CEO Dr. Zubin Damania, are trying to spark a physician revolt against bad EHR design.

Monday, health IT vendor athenahealth, with the help of Damania’s rapping alter-ego, ZDoggMD, launched “Let Doctors Be Doctors,” which is part platform for doctors to demand better electronic health records and, let’s face it, part athenahealth marketing campaign.

Bush spoke about the campaign Monday at the U.S. News Hospital of Tomorrow conference in Washington. He explained the problem in a U.S. News & World Report op-ed:

Health care is the only industry that has managed to lose productivity while going digital.

The typical electronic medical records software is a maze of tabs and dialog boxes that doctors must navigate to record the same information they used to be able to handle with a few notes in a file folder. And what do they get back for their effort? Sadly, consumer apps are much better at volunteering helpful information and unexpected insights.

Health care’s software problem will not be solved with a user interface overhaul – EMRs need to be smarter, not just prettier. Think networks, not software alone. We need to bring together the intelligence of doctors, nurses, patients, hospitals, laboratories, insurers and everyone else who contributes to the continuum of care.

As for ZDogg, he released a new music video for the campaign, singing about “crappy software,” to the tune of the Jay-Z duet with Alicia Keys, “Empire State of Mind.”

“These vendors act like they all kinda wack,” ZDogg raps, before taking a shot at market leader Epic Systems, probably with Bush’s blessing. The song also included a plug for Epocrates, which athenahealth just happens to own.

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“Big ups to athenahealth for being the only EHR vendor brave enough to admit that EHRs suck,” ZDogg said at the end of the video.

Damania also blogged on KevinMD about the Let Doctors Be Doctors. “I have a love-hate relationship with the electronic health record (EHR),” he wrote.

“To be precise, it’s 90 percent hate, 6 percent love. The missing 4 percent? That would be the percentage of time spent on the phone with tech support trying to figure out which order set I have to use to input percentages.”

He added:

Simply put, the Tower of Babel of existing EHRs may not ever talk to one another, but they do share one thing: they come between us and our patients. Staring at a screen to click boxes and satisfy quality measures while figuring out the seventeenth digit for an ICD-10 code — this nonsense robs us of precious time and attention that should be spent on and with patients. I would never advocate going back to paper. Ever. But we need to demand technology that binds us closer to those we care for, technology that lets doctors be doctors. And nurses, and RTs, and case managers, and dietitians, and scrub techs — [insert crucial care team member here].

As part of the campaign, healthcare professionals are being asked to comment and tweet about bad EHRs and the things they would like to see changed. Professional societies seem to be on board already.

So is the founder of KevinMD.