A newly published survey of 1,200 physicians nationwide by the Watertown, Mass.-based athenahealth, which specializes in providing cloud-based based services for electronic health record (EHR), practice management, and care coordination, is revealing a mixed bag of opinions among doctors regarding how well electronic health records (EHRs) are working for them, with a range of views about the efficacy, cost-benefit analysis, and usability, of EHRs. Meanwhile, attitudes towards government involvement in healthcare have become more positive in the past year. But there remains concern over the transition to the ICD-10 coding system.

The survey, whose results were made public on Aug. 12, found that, while a majority have a favorable opinion of EHRs, a majority also believe that the benefits of EHR implementation do not outweigh their costs, a finding that should cause healthcare IT leaders nationwide to pause.

Most notable for readers of our blog is the finding that a significant plurality of physicians in practice agree that EHRs were not designed with physicians in mind. Designing with users in mind -- in this case physicians -- is one of the fundamental building blocks of "User-Centered Design. (UCD)" Learn more about usability and User Experience @ www.TheUsabilityPeople.com

The Usability People are experts in UCD and are ready to conduct and report EHR usability findings in the NIST CCIF format.

Download the full report @ http://www.athenahealth.com/physician-sentiment-index/future-of-medicine...