Image by TaranRampersad via Flickr Bob Wachter from The Health Care Blog argues that medicine’s conversion from paper to electronic records has really only created “new-fangled electronic silos.” He wants more than that.
How great would it be if, through the medical record, I could interact with multiple specialists who have seen my patient – in real time, just like my kids are interacting with far-flung friends on Facebook. And if nurses could leave me a note which I could answer online without having to respond to a page. And if the daily plan for a patient – developed collaboratively – could be shared among all the caregivers, with notes appended when a patient’s clinical ship seemed to be blowing off course.
Speaking of real time, when are we going to further realize that electronic medical records need to be re-metaphored: They need to move from being seen less as a snapshot of a patient’s health status, to more of a streaming movie of a person’s ongoing health functioning in real time (see my post at the World Health Care Blog).
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September 14, 2008 at 9:55 am
This is very sad for me to watch. In the USA, the introduction of Stark Law “reforms” was promoted as allowing hospitals to make investments in new technology on behalf of physicians’ offices as the latter could not afford the large-scale investments.
However, the law also says that once one hospital makes an investment, no other hospital is allowed to also provide the tools. This in turn that each physician’s office is tied to sharing data with only one hospital.
This is a tragic waste of an opportunity for improving patient care.