'Big Brother in the Exam Room' Author Twila Brase: EHRs Present Serious Problems and Perils--Perhaps the Most Significant, Patient Safety

.

Electronic health records (EHRs) have infringed upon the patient-doctor relationship in innumerable ways, but none more glaring than how EHRs have turned doctors away from patients and into data clerks.

.

It's just the tip of the iceberg of how the mandated, government-certified EHR technology has negatively affected doctors and patients.

.

Citizens' Council for Health Freedom (CCHF) has released a new, groundbreaking book that exposes these EHR pitfalls. Written by CCHF president and co-founder Twila Brase, RN, PHN, and published by Beaver's Pond Press, "Big Brother in the Exam Room: The Dangerous Truth About Electronic Health Records" shows how and why Congress forced doctors and hospitals to install a data-collecting, command and control surveillance system in the exam room. It also includes the impact of EHRs on privacy, patient care, costs, patient safety and more, according to doctors and more than 125 studies.

.

"EHRs present a plethora of serious problems and perils, but perhaps the most significant is patient safety," said Brase. "Because of the EHR, doctors are focused on data entry rather than on their patients. In fact, doctors tell me that their critical thinking is limited because they are filling out fields and checking off boxes rather than truly listening to and communicating with patients. EHRs force doctors to change the way they think. In using EHRs, for instance, they must look through 250 options to find a specific billing code, then once the condition is located, they must find the option of how the doctor plans to treat it. This is a serious distraction that impedes on privacy, ethics and security."

.

"Big Brother in the Exam Room," available at Amazon.com and www.BigBrotherInTheExamRoom.com, brings light to the serious dangers lurking behind the government's $30 billion EHR experiment. This omnipresent technology shifts doctors' attention from patients to paperwork--while health plans, government agencies and the health data industry profit. Likewise, patients who think the HIPAA "privacy" rule protects the confidentiality of their medical information will be shocked to discover it makes their medical records an open book.

.

"Big Brother in the Exam Room" also highlights how patient treatment decisions are controlled and tracked by the EHR; what specific steps back to freedom, privacy and patient safety are available; and why we must act now.

.

Scot Silverstein, M.D, a medical informatics specialist and independent EHR forensics expert, gave this endorsement for "Big Brother in the Exam Room."

.

"Finally, a book that takes the approach to health IT that my early medical mentor, cardiothoracic surgery pioneer Victor P. Satinsky, M.D., took towards medicine: 'Critical thinking, always, or your patient's dead.' The approach to health IT to date has usually been one of industry-led marketing puffery and 'ignore-the-downsides, full-steam-ahead' hyperenthusiasm," Silverstein said. "The result has been loss of privacy and security, increased (not decreased) risks and costs, and loss of physician-patient autonomy to the computer--and the computer's bureaucratic masters. In 'Big Brother in the Exam Room,' author Twila Brase 'tells it like it is,' namely, that the dreams of cybernetic medical utopia need to be dampened by the harsh master of medical reality."

.

For more information about CCHF, visit www.cchfreedom.org, its Facebook page or its Twitter feed @CCHFreedom. Read more about "Big Brother in the Exam Room" here, and view the media page for CCHF here. For more about CCHF's free-market, cash-based care initiative, The Wedge of Health Freedom, visit www.JointheWedge.com, The Wedge Facebook page or follow The Wedge on Twitter @wedgeoffreedom.