electronic medical records (EMRs)
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The Fax of Life
When you walk into the Arlington Women’s Center, you see a spacious waiting room with artwork on the wall, maroon chairs, and a friendly receptionist sitting at the front desk. The obstetrics and gynecology practice serves a high-income suburb of Washington, DC. Framed photographs on the wall advertise the center’s physicians who’ve made lists of the city’s best doctors. It’s a modern, upscale doctor office. But when it needs to share patient records, it turns to an outdated technology: the fax machine...
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The Flaws Of Electronic Records
Drexel University's Scot Silverstein is a leading critic of the rapid switch to computerized medical charts, saying the notion that they prevent more mistakes than they cause is not proven. Read More »
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The Golden Age Of Health Informatics?
So much attention is paid to the problems in the trenches that it is easy to forget just how far we've come in the past few years. It was only 2008 when the oft-cited DesRoches NEJM survey showed that 4 percent of physicians had a clinically active electronic medical records system (my term for what they called fully functional EMRs). [...] Read More »
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The Medical Chart: Ground Zero For The Deterioration Of Patient Care
..This week I’ve been considering how in-patient doctoring has changed since I was in medical school. Unfortunately, my experience is that most of the changes have been for the worse...
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The New Rules of Healthcare Platforms (Part 4): APIs Enable the Platforming of Healthcare
Recent regulations have mandated the use of HL7 FHIR APIs (application programming interfaces) to share health data. The regs apply to healthcare providers, payers, and technology developers who participate in federal programs. Many incumbent healthcare organizations are viewing these mandates as a compliance burden. That’s short-sighted. We recommend a more opportunistic POV. APIs facilitate the sharing of health data across different devices and platforms. By adopting APIs, healthcare organizations can transform themselves from traditional service providers into powerful platforms that can connect patients, providers, and other stakeholders in new and innovative ways.
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The Obama Crony In Charge Of Your Medical Records
Who is Judy Faulkner? Chances are, you don't know her -- but her politically connected, taxpayer-subsidized electronic medical records company may very well know you. Top Obama donor and billionaire Faulkner is founder and CEO of Epic Systems, which will soon store almost half of all Americans' health information. If the crony odor and the potential for abuse that this "epic" arrangement poses don't chill your bones, you ain't paying attention.
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The Problem of “Copy and Paste” in Electronic Records
A study of 23,630 internal medicine progress notes written by 460 different hospitalists, residents, and medical students found that a mean of only 18% of the text was created by hand with 46% copied and pasted from previous note or somewhere else and 36% imported from another part of the record such as a medication list. The analysis, done at the University of California San Francisco*, was possible because the Epic electronic medical record used there can provide the provenance of every character entered in a progress note...
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The Salaries Of Health Executives: What Can Doctors Do?
... Health care costs in the U.S. remain above those of all other industrialized countries while physician salaries continue to fall. Even though the U.S. spends more dollars per capita on health care than any other country on earth, our outcomes, when compared to other nations, remain mediocre at best...
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The Top 7 Free And Open Source EMR Software Products
As a doctor you may not be able to completely avoid burdensome healthcare regulations or government EHR mandates, but you can at least minimize the cost of those mandates by implementing one of the many free Electronic Medical Records software options. Read More »
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The Tragedy Of Electronic Medical Records
...Digitizing medical records was supposed to transform health care—improving the quality of care and the service provided to patients while helping cut out unnecessary costs...But lately, electronic medical record systems are getting nothing but votes of no-confidence from physicians, hospitals, insurers and IT experts...
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The Way To Doctors' Hearts Is Through Their EMR
...EPIC is perhaps the most popular of the present EMRs in the States. There have also been many complaints about EPICs design...
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The Widespread Problem of Doctor Burnout
The patient, a powerfully built middle-aged restaurant worker, had awakened one morning with a tight pain in his shoulders that traveled down his right arm. At work, he could barely shrug his shoulders or turn his head. “My fingers were so weak,” he recalled, “that I couldn’t even get a good grip around a glass of water.” A senior doctor at a local clinic diagnosed a pinched nerve and prescribed a muscle relaxant. Two weeks later, only more incapacitated, the patient went to another clinic, where a younger doctor made the right diagnosis: A malignant tumor in his chest was pressing against a nerve to his arm...
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This Algorithm Accidentally Predicted Which Hospital Patients Were Most Likely To Die
Sepsis is one of the biggest hospital hazards you’ve maybe never heard of. When the body overreacts to an infection, it can trigger widespread inflammation that can in turn cause tissue damage and organ failure. It causes one-third to one-half of all deaths in US hospitals. But because sepsis’s symptoms, like fever and difficulty breathing, sometimes look a lot like other illnesses, it can be hard to detect, especially in the early stages. So a team at Banner Health, a hospital system in Phoenix, Arizona, turned to computer science for a solution...
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Thousands Of NFL Players' Medical Records Stolen From Skins Trainer
In late April, the NFL recently informed its players, a Skins athletic trainer’s car was broken into. The thief took a backpack, and inside that backpack was a cache of electronic and paper medical records for thousands of players, including NFL Combine attendees from the last 13 years. That would encompass the vast majority of NFL players, and for them, it’s a worrying breach of privacy; for the NFL, it’s potentially a costly violation of medical privacy laws.Last month the league alerted the players’ union to the theft...
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Top HIT Trends For 2014: Accelerated Change Is Coming
Healthcare IT News recently published a series of articles looking back at the incredible progress HIT has made over the last decade. The last nine quarters in particular, starting not surprisingly when Meaningful Use checks got posted for EMR implementation, have seen remarkable accelerated change. [...] Read More »
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