I hope I'm not inflicting an American cliche, but, especially when I work with smaller clinical practices, I find it is rather liberating to tell clinicians that they do not need Electronic Medical Records (EMR).

Surprised, they inquire if health informatics is useless, and I say it's very valuable. My point is that the EMR proper is something that a computer uses. Unless the clinician happens to be able to read the HL7 and XML notations, the EMR is useless.

What is useful is the information that can be stored in an EMR, the clinically relevant ways it can be presented, and the ways in which information systems make it easier to store information. To increase the comfort of practitioners with this sort of organization, I often "play computer", manually creating papers in a conventional chart, which represent the way in which an automated system could present information.

I'm doing this with my personal physician. In my own health records, I keep a single (well,now two-sheet) list of current therapies, allergies and sensitivities, and significant medical history. The variant I create for my physician's office record is a cover sheet that has all my current medications and contraindications. Previously, he had to pull medication histories from a long cumulative section of the chart where he'd X-through discontinued medications, put highlight color on interactions, etc.

How can we build confidence? Can this be a training aid?