I hate writing progress notes. Sure, they’re essential to document to a patient’s hospital course, but most of the note is repetitive. Even worse, my hospital uses a hybrid medical record system.  The computerized portion stores all laboratory values and initial consults. The daily progress notes by the primary team and consults are all handwritten.  The nursing pods usually have only one or two computers, one of which is always used by nursing to view people.com and perez hilton.  Thus, every morning I vie for that lone open computer while fumbling through illegible chickenscratch.  Do we regress that quickly from grade school? And clearly I’ve discovered that penmanship doesn’t correlate with hand dexterity- surgeon scribble is no better than internist scribble. I’m no calligrapher, but at least I make an active effort to be legible.

This cycle repeats for each of the 8-12 patients every morning for 4 week blocks at a time. That’s enough to push anyone into insanity, or any cynical housestaff to reinforce his jaded outlook on the medical system.  And if slovenly human behavior doesn’t do it, the computers like to seize and go into endless reboots daily around 6am – 8am.  That’s hospital IT (information technology) for ya.

medicine inpt medicine, rant