I thank Dr Mackey for his response to my side of the debate in the October issue of Canadian Family Physician.1 I also think that his patients are fortunate to have him as their family physician; it is very evident that the quality of care they receive is important to him and that he uses the tools available to monitor and improve this.
I do not feel discouraged at all and plan to continue working and doing research with and about electronic medical records (EMRs) and the data they contain. However, I think that we should have made much more progress after 10 years of EMR implementation. I do not think the limited progress is isolated to any particular area or EMR vendor, rather, it is the overall functioning of our health information technology (IT) system that is problematic.
This is not to say that there has been a lack of progress; there has been improvement in the past few years, for example, in electronic transmission of laboratory results, diagnostic imaging, and hospital reports. There are also areas of excellent work; we need to hear more about those.
Footnotes
Competing interests
None declared
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