Posted on 06/07/2009 9:45:41 PM PDT by newbie2008
CurtMonash writes "The Indianapolis Star reports that Tuesday Morning, Methodist Hospital turned away patients in ambulances, for the first time in its 100-plus history. Why? Because the electronic health records (EHR) system had gone down the prior afternoon — due to a power surge — and the backlog of paperwork was no longer tolerable. If you think about that story, it has a couple of disturbing aspects. Clearly the investment in or design of high availability, surge protection, etc. were sadly lacking. But even leaving that aside — why do problems with paperwork make it necessary to turn away patients? Maybe the latter is OK, since there obviously were other, more smoothly running hospitals to send the patient to. Still, the whole story should be held up as a cautionary tale for hospitals and IT suppliers everywhere."
It’d be interesting to know whether they turned away trauma patients or just general ambulance patients. Hospitals routinely turn away ambulance patients when they’re busy. Trauma patients arriving by ambulance, however, continue to be seen unless the trauma facility has become saturated.
Diverting ambulance patients with non-critical conditions because you need time to straighten out the records doesn’t strike me as a major issue. The same thing happens when the waiting room’s full of flu patients.
A review of the article indicates it was a busy diversion. They were continuing to take walk-in patients.
Irritating, inconvenient for the patients, and something that should be designed around, but if you think about it, it’s actually an indication that the computer system enabled them to treat more patients than the old manual records system would have permitted.
Note to self: Avoid Indy.
/johnny
ping
Why! Because the federal government has increased the amount of paperwork hospitals need to keep. 2/3rds the paper work I got the last time I went to the hospital was explaining my rights.
on a similar vein, my dad got into a bicycle accident not too long ago, I got a call from the hospital saying he had been in the emergency room, but when I got there they said their computer had no record of him, and to try to call other hospitals around the city to see where he might be.
Turns out he was at that hospital, but it was surprising to me that
1. it took so long for him to register in their system
2. There wasn’t some sort of single data base for emergency room patients across the city who had just recently been admitted
....
Don’t give up on Indy for this.
Methodist hospital is in the middle of a concentration of hospitals. I.U. medical center and others are literally blocks away.
If they were simply turning away non-trauma patients to one of these others, then I cannot see the issue. Is it inconvenient, yes. But given the reliance on electronic records for dispensing of medications and treatments, it is a responsible reaction to an embarrassing situation.
My good friend is an ER nurse @ the Wish.....I hope she wasn’t working that night....
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