As the elemental unit of the electronic health record, the SmartPhrase has evolved as a staple of health information. But is it really that new?
Bryan Vartabedian:
But packaged as part of a dangerous copy-and-paste trend in medicine, the SmartPhrase has earned the reputation as the processed meat of health information. More evidence, they say, of medicine’s dysphoric slide.
But I used SmartPhrases long before EPIC.
The truth is that my ink scratch on paper during the analog phase of my career was nothing more than an endless daisy chain of recurring bits of language scribbled again and again and again. My mind was a SmartPhrase generator, creating one after another with a Uni-Ball Signio 207 Bold (still my weapon of choice when paper calls).
Great point by Dr Vartabedian. Just because there is a new technology that facilitates something, that doesn’t mean that we hadn’t always been doing something similar all along.
