The Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom charges the Obamacare requirement that doctors use electronic health records has caused a surge of burnout in the medical profession, explains Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.
“The EHR is causing doctors to leave their patients,” said Twila Brase, the president of CCHF and the author of “Big Brother in the Exam Room: The Dangerous Truth About Electronic Health Records.”
“Congress forced doctors to buy and use computerized record systems to collect and report patient data to the government. And it’s wreaking havoc on their practices and their patients.”
A new report in the American Journal of Medicine found that over just three years as Obamacare was being implemented, “physician burnout increased significantly, from 45.5 percent to 54.4 percent.”
“Parallel studies of all U.S. workers during the same period showed no changes,” the report found.
It also said studies “show the doctors spend more face time on their EHRs than with their patients.”
“The hours spent cloning notes in a mandated doctor computer relationship leaves the physician unable to experience the best part of being a doctor,” it said.
CCHF pointed out one physician, Tom Davis, “left his 25-year practice and 3,000 patients because of the ‘demands of data entry, the use of that data to direct care’ – in other words, outside control of treatment decisions.”
There also were concerns about “how medical data was used.”
“Fifty-four percent of physicians are affected by burnout, and the leading cause is the EHR,” Brase said. “One study found that doctors spend two hours at the computer for every hour they spend caring for patients. And a 2015 Mayo Clinic study found more than 7 percent of nearly 7,000 doctors had considered suicide in the past 12 months.”
For the rest of this report, and more, please go to Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.
