Medical Art and the Art of Medicine in EHR Design
One of the things EHR developers completely and consistently miss about clinical medicine is how kinesthetic, and aesthetic true medical evaluations are.
Photo by @MichellesMedicalArt
Doctors use their senses in an integrated fashion to diagnose and treat. Heat, color, motion, texture, etc. For a good clinician, this intel is integrated and cross-correlated.
I was lucky to work with experienced clinicians from Northern Canada, South Africa, the UK, Palestine, Africa, the US Ivy Leagues, Pakistan, and Texas in my medical training. The one thing the best healers had in common was not education, fame, or location. It was a conscious appreciation for synthesized sensory input in intuiting the severity of disease and the trajectory of healing.
Where are we documenting this information in the EHR? We used to convert these observations to descriptive words, now we cram them into checkboxes that a developer coded. Without this datapoint, doctors will continue to actively resist EHR as inadequate to document their clinical decisionmaking. And they will be right.
That said, shout out to @michellesmedicalart on Instagram a beautiful example of how surgery looks and feels to an insider. Michelle, I'm your new biggest fan!
#todreamalife @michellesmedicalart #BringingBedsideBack #Stanford25
