Another unintended consequence of this is that it makes it extremely difficult for doctors and nurses to pull data to do basic research or look at patient outcomes.

For example, if you wanted to see what the outcomes of giving a specific drug at a specific dose to a specific group of patients at your hospital was, you're in for a real fun time manually copy-and-pasting thousands of entries from the EMR to a spreadsheet.

Now more than ever it is important to look at data relating to patient outcomes with various COVID treatments that haven't been thoroughly vetted yet. But, guess why your local hospital isn't doing anything like that? Because what should be a simple 3-hour exploratory data analysis that can be breezed through IRB now has to involve a budget component of hiring a professional copy-paste person. Can't even use med students to do it anymore because they aren't allowed to hang around the hospital due to COVID, and you can't access those records remote due to HIPAA.