Technology Changing the Patient-Doctor Relationship!For a physician, the patient’s trust is important. For the patient, to trust the physician is even more important. With the ever adapting technological shift the medical field has seen, it appears that more doctors are becoming distracted with it than using it to help patients. A recent study from Northwestern University has found that doctors who use electronic health records (EHR) in the exam room spend about one third of their time looking at the screen as opposed to the patient.!!The research, which found its way into the International Journal of Medical Informatics, highlighted 100 doctor visits. Each of these visits was monitored to see how long the doctor is looking at the EHR versus the patient.!

!There were a few things that the researchers noticed right away.!• When the doctors where looking at the screen they often missed nonverbal cues from the

patient.!• Patients mostly agreed that if they saw the doctor using the EHR in the exam room that they

were less likely to trust the physician.!• Physicians who use the EHR in the exam room were considered as “not knowing” as much

as they should according to a majority of patients.!!Another unique discovery was found over the course of the research. Many patients were found looking at the screen as well. Even if patients didn’t fully understand what was on the screen their curiosity could not be stopped.!!From this the researchers considered a possible transition into user/patient friendly applications that would allow the patients to get a watered down version of the health records into a language they can understand.!!Larry Garber, who works as a medical director of informatics at Reliant Medical Group in Massachusetts says that a patient-doctor relationship can be made or broken by the level of competence the doctor has and the trust that patient has in him or her. If the EHR is causing this relationship strain it is possible that medical centers will move into the future by either updating the system or taking away the EHR from the exam room entirely.