Why Has the EHR Made Our Lives Worse?

Day after day I meet with surgeons who tell me that any new software or AI has to integrate with their EHR. If you take a hard look at EHRs, that argument doesn’t make sense.

Since the Meaningful Use program launched in 2011 under the HITECH Act, electronic health records (EHRs) have been championed as the key to modernizing healthcare. Yet more than a decade later, many surgeons find that EHRs have actually made our lives worse. Not only is this failure impacting patients but it has affected the entire ecosystem of surgical innovation in the U.S. The reason lies in the surgical value chain—a complex sequence of activities from lead generation to post-op follow-up—that EHRs were never built to support.

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The Surgical Value Chain: A Primer

Surgery isn’t a single event; it’s a journey comprising multiple interdependent stages. Each stage demands specialized tools, data flows, and handoffs:

1. Lead Generation: Attracting and qualifying prospective patients through marketing channels.
2. Patient Engagement: Educating and nurturing those prospects with personalized content and communication.
3. Prequalification: Verifying clinical and financial eligibility in advance of scheduling.
4. Optimized Scheduling: Balancing OR availability, case complexity, and patient convenience.
5. Patient-Facing Integration: Seamless portals and telehealth links that maintain brand consistency.
6. MarTech Integration: Closing the loop between marketing efforts and actual surgical volume.
7. AI-Driven Insights: Using machine learning to predict outcomes, personalize care pathways, and surface high-risk cases.
8. Intelligent Note Authoring: Auto-generating payer-ready documentation to reduce denials and delays.

A truly vertical SaaS platform stitches these stages into one unified pipeline—each module sharing data, workflows, and intelligence.

EHRs vs. the Value Chain: Where They Fall Short

EHR systems were designed to digitize patient charts, streamline billing, and satisfy regulatory requirements. But they have largely:

• Prioritized compliance over usability, burdening surgeons with clunky interfaces and extensive documentation requirements.
• Isolated key functions, leaving marketing, patient engagement, scheduling, and clinical documentation disconnected.

By ignored surgeon workflow optimization, they have directly contributed to burnout and dissatisfaction, while delivering minimal gains in clinical quality or operational efficiency.

Here’s how they derail each link in the value chain:

• Disjointed Lead Generation
• Clunky Patient Engagement
• Manual Prequalification
• Inefficient Scheduling
• Siloed Patient-Facing Tools
• Missing MarTech Connections
• Relegating AI to an Add-On Feature
• Tedious Note Authoring

The Human Toll: Burnout, Dissatisfaction, and Poor Outcomes

When each stage of the value chain is fractured, the consequences compound:

• Surgeon Burnout: Hours spent clicking through EHR screens, reconciling billing codes, and switching between disparate tools.
• Staff Frustration: Front-desk teams juggle patient queries across portals, CRM integrations, spreadsheets, and fax machines.
• Poor Patient Experiences: From confusing intake forms to opaque scheduling and unexpected bills, patient satisfaction plummets.
• Operational Inefficiency: Lack of prioritizing surgical patients on the schedule, last-minute cancellations, and revenue leakage drive up costs.
• Diminished Clinical Quality: Shortfalls in real-time insights delays interventions for at-risk patients and undermines value-based care initiatives.

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Conclusion: A Call to Rethink Our Platforms

The EHR’s one-size-fits-all architecture has left surgeons and care teams juggling a patchwork of tools—each undermining the next. By ignoring the true end-to-end value chain in surgery, EHRs have inadvertently made our lives worse: fueling burnout, eroding satisfaction, and compromising patient outcomes.

To reverse this trend, we need purpose-built vertical SaaS solutions that:

• Unify Workflows across marketing, scheduling, clinical care, and billing.
• Embed Intelligence at every stage with native AI and seamless data sharing.
• Prioritize Users with surgeon-first UX and modular designs that grow with the practice.

Only by aligning technology with the full surgical value chain can we restore joy to clinical practice, optimize efficiency, and, most importantly, improve patient care.

Fire up!