I'm a doc, and I want to agree, but I know we can do better:
- Culture: docs use Macs. 40%. Well above the general population. And my experience has been they have a clue. These are the people doing data analysis, writing research papers, etc.
- Disasters: the military uses computers in disasters all the time. As a prior Navy line officer with some disaster response experience (http://nielsolson.us/Haversian/science/social_science/disast...), I think I can safely say computers can be hugely leveraged in disasters. In fact, the military's medical record system is deployable: you can clone a segment of the database and ship it with the unit into theater, then merge the changes back in.
- Time: thus far, I agree with you. The Navy's surgery program in San Diego is actually on probation for being over on work hours and under on patients. The AHLTA system is fantastically inefficient (apparently the implemented the whole thing without understanding HL-7 messaging). I experience this every day. The paper charts are much faster. And our ER scans there notes. That would be fine by me. Run OCR on the scans.
-Money: barring some major paradigm shift affecting the relationship between doctors and hospital administrators, I suspect this will be the last thing to be saved.
-Bugs: happen. We rely on computers in healthcare all the time in real time, from your vitals in the ER to the Da Vinci machine.
Overall, I really hope this problem gets cracked. Soon. Because if you've tried to go back through a hard films x-ray room that's three blocks away and locked at 2 am because you really want to know WTF is going on with this patient, you realize paper is crazy.
- Culture: docs use Macs. 40%. Well above the general population. And my experience has been they have a clue. These are the people doing data analysis, writing research papers, etc.
- Disasters: the military uses computers in disasters all the time. As a prior Navy line officer with some disaster response experience (http://nielsolson.us/Haversian/science/social_science/disast...), I think I can safely say computers can be hugely leveraged in disasters. In fact, the military's medical record system is deployable: you can clone a segment of the database and ship it with the unit into theater, then merge the changes back in.
- Time: thus far, I agree with you. The Navy's surgery program in San Diego is actually on probation for being over on work hours and under on patients. The AHLTA system is fantastically inefficient (apparently the implemented the whole thing without understanding HL-7 messaging). I experience this every day. The paper charts are much faster. And our ER scans there notes. That would be fine by me. Run OCR on the scans.
-Money: barring some major paradigm shift affecting the relationship between doctors and hospital administrators, I suspect this will be the last thing to be saved.
-Bugs: happen. We rely on computers in healthcare all the time in real time, from your vitals in the ER to the Da Vinci machine.
-Proprietary data formats: there are growing standards: -- http://code.google.com/apis/health/ccrg_reference.html -- http://medical.nema.org/
Overall, I really hope this problem gets cracked. Soon. Because if you've tried to go back through a hard films x-ray room that's three blocks away and locked at 2 am because you really want to know WTF is going on with this patient, you realize paper is crazy.