There has been a lot of news recently about a national health record being able to display a patient record for the clinicians if someone appears in a hospital.
The example that is cited the most is someone appears unconscious at an emergency room at a hospital when they are out of town. The system pulls up their medical records even though they haven’t been there before.
This scenario depends on three factors occurring:
1. The patient is out of town.
2. The patient has an event that causes them to go to the emergency room.
3. The patient arrives unconscious and without family or without some sort of medical information on them.
While I’m sure this example does happen, it would not be the norm; it would be an aberration. I would think that patients who have serious conditions like heart problems would take some medical information with them when they travel in case something happens. Or at least they would be with family members who know what their medical issues are. They would probably have their medications with them when they travel even if they don’t have them in the emergency room.
This scenario is very dramatic and compelling but would not occur often enough to justify the expense the time and effort to create these systems. The scenario that should be targeted to improve would be the day to day flow of medical data in a health system. Patients are asked to complete similar paperwork with similar pieces of data each time they visit a new location in a health care system, physician office, emergency room, surgery, etc. Fixing this problem would save more expense and improve more patient care than the unconscious patient appearing in a out of town ER.
The data reflect Community’s high quality patient care for indicators in three categories:
Heart attack
Congestive heart failure
Pneumonia
Community’s quality data are compared against national hospital averages and are provided for all network hospitals: Community Hospitals North, East, South and Anderson, and The Indiana Heart Hospital.
Like more than a few people, I downloaded the new Chrome browser to see what it was like. The most interesting thing about it is how it integrates into other Google services like Bookmarks and Web History. It’s like Google had this browser in mind when they created those services. Right now I have those working in other browsers through the Google Toolbar, but they are built right into Chrome. As Spock would say, “Fascinating.”
I am proposing a waiting period for new! cool ideas. Like there is for buying guns.
You know, those ideas that come from IT news sources and press releases about the latest thing that’s coming out soon.
The minimum waiting period before making any changes or building something new because of a cool idea is two weeks. Oh come on, with guns it is a month.
There could also be a sliding scale that depends on the size of the project. Small one page application the waiting period could be a week. A larger application or a new website should be a least a month.
The waiting period is to give the idea time to mature so that you don’t end up always chasing the LatestNewCool thing and never actually build something that works. Or to let you cool down so that you don’t build something just for the sake of using the LatestNewCool thing. Just like with guns.
And for all iPhone applications that waiting period must be three weeks. Minimum.
Community Health Network’s e-Business team and staff at Community Regional Cancer Center launched the network’s new myCommunity Express Check-In system Friday, August 29th, with much success.
This project is the culmination of over a year of partnership with various network departments and NCR health care.