EMR Developers “Need to Sit with Us, the Doctors and the Nurses, by Our Side, for Eight Hours at a Shot, and See What it Is We Do”

The Resonance Test 52: Danielle Ofri

We need to talk about electronic medical records. Dr. Danielle Ofri certainly does. Why? The physician-author of the newly published volume, When We Do Harm, tells our Jonathon Swersey, on the latest episode of this podcast: “I was just tearing my hair out” because a patient requested a biopsy report and she spent nearly 45 minutes trying to extract it from the EMR. When Ofri says “Now it falls on the clinicians to somehow find time to customize the EMR to make it workable,” you get a vivid sense of how EMRs contribute to physician burnout.

Ofri, it turns out, has all kinds of strong opinions. Listen to this episode and you’ll learn, for instance, how shame functions in the world of medical error. (After making an error as a second-year resident, she says: “It took me 20 years till I could talk about and write about it.”) Ofri also discusses the naming of medicines, the common good and American healthcare, and what it’s like to practice medicine during the current pandemic and prepare for the next one.

Attend to Ofri, Resonance Test listeners. When she speaks, she does good.

Host: Kyle Wing
Editor: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon