Empowering care teams “ We have to move beyond the EMR . It ’ s a poor proxy for communication .” Kos begins . He continues to note that whilst many US health systems have spent hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars on their EMR systems , the spend has not boosted productivity or improved clinical workflow . A digital health record is important , but when coupled with a last-century pager system for communication , a disorganized intranet for policies and procedures , or a manual clinical education process , the potential value goes unrecognized . “ The growth of shadow IT in health is phenomenal . I see clinicians using personal email addresses , swapping patient files over personal cloud storage , texting patient images and EMR screenshots
on their personal phones , even using personal messaging services for patient handover or online groups for clinical research .”. Kos observes that clinicians aren ’ t trying to be rogue with medical information , but they are frustrated with the tools that they are expected to use in the workplace .
There are better ways to help clinicians communicate , collaborate , team and learn . For each insecure , consumer cloud service , there is an enterprise grade , HIPAA compliant
82 November 2017