Should Electronic Health Systems Address the Interruptive Nature of Healthcare Environments?
I keep complaining about healthcare systems not addressing interruptive nature of
health care environment. I do realize that solving this problem is impossible. We humans fail in multitasking. Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him) said this in a figurative way when he stated that God did not create humans with two hearts. When multitasking we keep shifting between tasks. This shifting of attention cost time and can lead to mistakes. In a way, we are similar to the processors we designed. When we ask a processor to multitask the processor’s overhead increases with no benefit in the total time spent processing all the requests.
It is the job of clinicians to reduce the distractions in their environment. Two things that are hard to get rid of are the patient and the medical chart. Depending on where you practice, it could be extremely hard to shut out other distractions. The last thing we should do is to make the situation worse with a computer.
What I want to say is; although preventing health care systems from exacerbating distractions is impossible, it should be seriously addressed.
