Last night to prepare for the battle ahead I baked cookies while listening to Reggae.
Isn't that what everyone does before an exam? Well they should.
I woke up this morning and found a links to research that where presented at the American College of Physicians annual meeting in Toronto last week. They were talking about a paper titled EHR-Based Quality Measurement and Reporting—Critical for Meaningful Use and Health Care Improvement. I am for this. It's funny, early this week I had a long conversation with a physician about the problems of current EHR systems and they are often more of a burden than a blessing.
I was surprised to hear how slowly the technology is advancing. I actually don't believe the technology is not advancing. I suspect that hospitals and people who pay for introducing technology in the health care sector are the ones who are moving slowly and for many good reasons.
- Why experiment on patients if there is little data showing even a marginal benefit
- Resources are limited
- Do physicians, on the whole, want this?
- Do physicians really know what they want?
- is late baby-boomer friendly (most doctors and patients fit in this category)
- has enough flexiblity and advanced features to be useful/exciting to Gen X and Gen Y physicians and researcher
- is based on a standard that is portable & easily interoperable with existing EMR & EHR systems
- has an advanced, intuitive and attractive GUI (graphical user interface) like Windows 7 or OS X
- is strongly supported and endorsed by public and private insurers
So where do I want to get into this and try to make a difference?
There are many places to enter:
- design a better platform
- push for widespread adoption of a standard way to store the EHR data
- design education programs to get docs on board
- do research to see if there is potential for harm by NOT having EHR
Julian,
ReplyDeleteI think implementing new medical technologies into our health care is a great idea. I believe there are many new advancement in technology that would assist in the quality, speediness and consistency in patient care. However, like you mentioned there needs to be more research done as many of the advancement in medical technologies does not improve the delivery of health care.
I would like to share with you my first hand experience with implementing a new medical technology that seems to benefit the MDs but where non-physician staffs are negatively impacted as the technology disrupts the delivery of patient care.
So the ICU that I work has an electronic ICU- meaning the patients are watched by physicians and nurses who are located some 20-40 miles away. The electronic ICU physicians and nurses have access to the patients information. Theoretically this sounds like a brilliant idea because these patients are truly sick and should there be any changes in the patients condition, these e-ICU staff would be able to immediately detect them and notify the non-md staff (RNs, secretary, CNA etc).
But what I have experience is that the electronic ICU is not as efficient as thought because often times they intefer with patient care as they often call non-md staff for non critical issue and which often requires the non-md staff to leave the bedside of the patient to answer their questions which are often located in the MD progress notes. Thus patients have to wait longer for basic patient care needs....thus disrupting the care of the patient.
I have heard so many times from the non-md staff about what a waste of money it has been to utilize this type of technology and there has been no communication from administration, MDs and non-MD staff regarding the usefulness of this implementation.
So my point for you is that in the future should you ever become a part of EHR things please consider all staffs that are involved and the impact it may have on all staff as this will definitely impact the quality of care provided to the patient.
Healthcare will have to be paperless to keep up with the flow of information these days, but no one can agree on a universal IT platform; there is too much money to be had!
ReplyDeleteBut yeah, adoption of said technologies and advancement will have to come forcefully.
looking foward to having an old friend by my physician!
-fipps
you should research this with public govt data and publish it. i know a good statistician that can do the work if you can write the discussion. i'm just suggesting. ;)
ReplyDelete