BSN #1

-I'd make the company I work for change from MediTech to EPIC -Is your employer educating staff about Meaningful Use? NO, I actually had to find out on my own. -What system do you have (e.g. Meditech, Epic, Cerner, etc)? MediTech -What % of your day are you spending on the computer? 98% -How do you think your patients feel about the growing role of computers in healthcare? I feel that most people are starting to grasp the idea, and are appreciative that we are trying to better the system for them. I do feel it's taken some responsibility away from patients getting to fully understand, or memorize what they should...what pills they take, what's the name of them, what is it for, who are their consulting physicians. Now, it seems they just expect we know because we have a computer in front of us. That is a problem. Especially when they can get so much info. With EPIC, they get an After Visit Summary, with all of the up-to-date information on it, pending the doc/RN/MA put the correct information in.

I have been trained on Epic and partially on Meditech. The systems couldn't be more opposite. Coming from a Trauma Level 1 hospital to a CAH has been alarming on it's own, but when I was instructed to look something up using the F keys, I about choked on my own spit. The system looks outdated, and has it's own language. I have 10 years of nursing behind me, my BSN, and consider myself an educated individual. The codes and terms Meditech uses are just appaulling to say the least. And because not all of the system is activated, it's extremly frustrating to try learning independently. When I was trained on EPIC, I was super frustrated that we had to sit through classes to learn how to click, so it seemed. EPIC was much more user friendly, had an enormous informatic base of choices, and was very accessible. With Meditech, the DOS appearing system is irritating to navigate through, the "dictionaries" are confusing, and the on-line help site is just as frustrating with the "manuals" being in Word instead of PDF files. If you need to go to page 70...happy scrolling in word. It makes me want to move back to the Level 1 hospital.