Sandra Scott S; Emergency Medicine News 2020: 42 (1): 9 - Volume 42 - Issue 1 - p 9
"I doubt anyone fully grasped how dangerous the click of a mouse could be back in 2009 when President Obama signed the HITECH Act requiring physicians to abandon paper charts and begin using electronic medical records. The past decade has introduced a whole new world of medical errors by putting EMRs in the hands of fallible humans. Even when computers function flawlessly, the humans using them certainly do not.
Even the brightest physician's working memory can only process a finite amount of new information at a time. Physicians are less efficient at task-switching and less likely to complete tasks when their working memory gets overburdened with competing stimuli. (Ann Emerg Med. 2016;68[2]:189; http://bit.ly/2XkmUW7.) When we are interrupted, our performance suffers. Before EMRs, when we were still using timesheets, physicians were interrupted an average of 31 times in 180 minutes. (Acad Emerg Med. 2000;7[11]:1239; http://bit.ly/2NOaqD9.) Now we are interrupted even more by incessant requests to enter orders..."