Study: health care more about data management than patients

CALGARY — A University of Calgary study suggests that patient care is suffering from an overuse of computers in hospitals and doctor offices.

In the latest study, Dr. Myles Leslie from The School of Public Policy looked at health-care workers in the intensive care units of three U.S. hospitals. He found some doctors and nurses spent up to 90 per cent of their shift on a computer.

“You have the attitude already that this is becoming the job and the job is data management,” Leslie said Thursday.

“The job really isn’t fixing bodies and interacting with them. It’s just managing streams of data. That’s a big challenge.”

Leslie said too much computer work for staff could lead to patients feeling neglected and to less communication between doctors, nurses and social workers.

There was a time when conversations would revolve around a patient’s chart sitting at the foot of the bed, he said.

The study, which has been published in the journal Health Services Research, involved 446 hours of observational data collected from the three ICUs over one year.

The average time spent retrieving health information with the use of computers averaged about 49 per cent but was as high as 90 per cent.

Leslie suggested it may take awhile, but hospitals and medical schools need to educate healthcare professionals about a more balanced approach to patient care.

Leslie said part of the study involved talking to patients and families who were getting less hands-on attention.

“The father of a daughter who was inside the room said they come up. They look at the numbers. They ignore the patient. They leave. This is not right,” said Leslie.

“The experience . . . we got from the families we were talking to was ‘I feel like a piece of meat rather than somebody who is part of my care and really part of anything that is going on around here.”