EHRs Make it Difficult to Tell Patient Stories

The fact that Epic gathers a patient’s medical information, correspondence (between doctor and patient and among the patient’s doctors), and billing information in one place should, in theory, make medical care safer, less costly, and less fragmented.

But the problem-list format that Epic uses to organize medical information is, in itself, fragmented. The risk of this format, as physician and medical informatics expert Dr. Robert Wachter points out in a blog post, is that we may forget that “patients are more than the sum of their problems.”