Interesting article.
And if the computers are down, everything stops.
Why would everything stop?
I use the local military hospital. One day I had an appointment and the entire system was down - guess what? They used old fashioned paper! Ain’t that something?
I also like the idea of prescriptions being transmitted electronically to the pharmacist - as mentioned, few doctors have legible handwriting. I’ve had a lot of experience with druggists phoning my doctor to find out what it was. That wastes time for both.
As for the rest of the article, I’m in complete agreement. While I have nothing in my records Big Brother would be interested in, others might.
There are some elements of this I agree with, but I must admit, I wonder if this person has EVER worked, actually WORKED in a hospital doing patient care.
I have worked in health care for 25 years, and while I think this person understands the absolute STUPIDITY forced on us by the Clinton Administration called HIPAA (Health Insurance Portablity and Accountability Act) I could tell you all the bizzare ways this has negatively impacted heathcare, but there isn’t enough space. The bureaucratic overhead and costs it have incurred far, FAR outweigh any benefits.
As a result, the amount of paperwork, red tape and ass-covering that takes place has made the profession for physicians a very frustrating place indeed. You HAVE to have systems that can automate and handle this overhead, because without them, to work at any volume is a staggering task.
My speciality is Radiology Information Systems, and while the systems ARE complicated, sometimes difficult to maintain and do stop working, they are absolutely vital. I know, because I have been fortunate enough to span the time frame from when everything was done on paper to the other end where it will all be electronic. It has been an extremely difficult transition.
When I first worked in the field, in Radiology we used three-part requisitions for exams (remember to press firmly with that ball point pen...the pink copy goes HERE...the goldenrod copy goes HERE...) and we had a huge room of thousands of square feet, piled floor to high ceiling with paper folders with xrays that were manually filed according to a terminal digit filing system. There was an army of dedicated film librarians who maintained this, but being human beings, would occasionally misfile things. We had people who had a special aptitude and skill at finding misfiled xrays!
There was a huge logistical tail that gathered films each month from patients who had not had xrays in a certain number of years, pack them into carts, load them onto trucks to be carted off to a long term storage facility off-site. There was another huge logistical tail of people who would bring films back from that site each day if a patient was being seen who hadn’t been to the doctor in a few years and had their films shipped offsite.
Films got lost. Films were locked in physicians offices, squirreled away. There was even one famous case of a physician who was so concerned about not having films for his patients that he kept them in the trunk of his car.
There were fights between physicians for a patient’s films, because, after all, there was only one copy. The surgeon wanted them for a consult at the same time the patient was seeing the Oncologist, who needed them. There were fights, screaming and yelling at the poor film librarians who were only doing their job, but had to explain to patients and physicians why films were missing/unavailable.
It was awful.
And then there was the transcription of results, which is another story altogether. We went from having a turnaround of 6-10 days down to 24 hours or less using speech recognition. The Radiologists hated it, but service is service. (It was easier to speak as fast as you could to finish dictating a report and throw it into a queue to be typed up, where a human could listen and figure it out, than to speak more slowly and distinctly so that a computer could understand and translate what you said. This was difficult for the physicians to get used to, taking full responsibility for the content of the report.
And this person also has it wrong. It REALLY sucks for everyone when the systems go down. But you know what? We find a way to process them. It is waay slower, but we find a way.
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