Comments on: Charting a New Course
Add a Comment
- Docs are resisting the push for electronic medical records because it will not bring any additional revenue stream to their businesses. Let's face it, private practice doctors are businesspeople. More sick patients mean more revenue. Why would they be interested in improving efficiencies, minimizing redundancies, and making an extra expense that would not bring them more money? Wake up America, as long as health care remains a business there is scant incentive to actually improve the health of the patient.
- Reply to this comment
- Electronic records could have cost us our 2.5 year old son's life last month. Out of the blue our son started coughing up froth for hours and becoming extremely lethargic, worried that this was an indication that he had aspirated some foreign matter into his lungs (bathwater, gas range combustion by-product, who knows.), we took him to the pediatrician. The pediatrician appeared annoyed that we disturbed his time, said nothing was wrong with him and sent us away. The next day he developed into fever, generating large amounts of mucous, and had more difficulty breathing. We called our medical center's urgent care number to bring him in, but the nurse kept citing the pediatrician's electronic notes that nothing was wrong with our son and denied allowing us to bring him in again. By the next morning our son was in full sever bronchospasms and highly lethargic, something we'd never experienced before. We call a different pediatrician this time and she told us to bring him in immediately or go to the nearest emergency room and do not delay, where he was treated and recovered by 5 days later, but who knows what damage may have been done to the lungs in the interim of non-action. A week later our original pediatrician apologized for not listening to us that there might have been something wrong with his lungs; but I see it as more of a hazard of electronic records than anything. We had to go someplace that didn't have access to the electronic physician notes to get anyone to diagnose and treat our son objectively. It's a real-life, more serious version of the Seinfeld episode where Elaine's doctors kept adding "difficult patient" to her medical records and kept being ignored by other doctors who saw the notes.
- Reply to this comment
- Are we building a health IT Tower of Babel?
Overlooked in most of the electronic health records discussion is the potential for population-level analysis -- finding healthcare patterns and measuring quality and improvement over time. Only if systems work together via data exchanges or other data pooling can we get the most out of our EHR investment. More insights -- http://www.healthcaretownhall.com/?cat=3 - Reply to this comment
- well, we dont want goverments to abuse this like they do a goverment hospitals..the patients at a goverment hospital is treated like a number,or cattle...dont seem to be that care giving loving treatment at those hospitals by their staffs in most cases,people seem to be a number when they call ''next''.....we cant allow this to be abused and treated unhuman!
- Reply to this comment
- this can be a good thing if not abused by our goverment...next thing you know we all have to wear one by law,our kids for school,us for work ,and etc....technology can be of good use,but goverment can abuse that technology also...
- Reply to this comment
- WHERE IS THE MONEY FOR ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORDS, it is not available anywhere and there are 46 billion, they said available, please let me know because I already spent 250k and I cannot get in line anywhere to apply for this so called money. Its a joke
- Reply to this comment
- I wonder how long it will be before the government passes a law that makes citizens use microchips like the ones used to chip dogs? Big Brother is working hard to control our every movement, thought, and action. I can smell a revolution coming soon.
- Reply to this comment
- Electronic medical records are a terrific idea. However, the fact that records may be accessible online throughout a medical system, does not alleviate the fact that doctors and medical personnel must actually READ the records! On at least three occasions, medical personnel did not read my father's records following a stroke and if I had not been present to monitor his care, the resulting treatment may have proven fatal! And his medical provider is the provider most often cited as the leader in electronic records keeping. Merely reading his chart was all that was necessary.
A friend of mine is allergic to one - count it - one medication (sulfa drugs) and as recently as two weeks ago, was prescribed a drug that sulfa is the basis of. Again, merely READING the chart (that was available online, mind you) would have alerted the doctor and nurses involved.
So, while I embrace the concept, basic human attention is still necessary to prevent medical negligence. - Reply to this comment
- As an ICU RN for almost 3 decades using EMR since the beginning of the year, I can tell you there are many negatives to the system. Many have been stated in the comments already logged on the CBS site. Yes, it does help decrease mistakes but it is NOT a panacea ! Computer charting is a huge time sink taking me away from concentrating on the basics and actually providing care to my patients. We are hearing complaints from patients about lack of face to face time. Managers are up in arms about this,nurses are stressed about being handcuffed to the computer, our nurse to patient ratio is worsening making time charting even more. Who is looking at our accuracy of charting ? Am I getting the right buttons pushed ? I know I am at work many hours after my shift ends finishing charting. How accurate can that be ? Our computer system for charting is the same as Kaiser and it is NOT user friendly. The company did not provide much support at all at the staff nurse level and we are still having huge issues that should have been fixed before the system got to my level. Yes, having those lab/x rays online is nice if they can be found. And how about those sticky notes in every single data cell ? Useless ! Our hospital told us not to use them since the information in them can never be retrieved. Interesting. So it is NOT easy to find info in the EMR,it just sounds like it would be.
- Reply to this comment
- Most doctors do prefer paper charts. As a certified medical transcriptionist, I can tell you that I've been with the paperless charts idea for a long long time, but the fact remains that there are MAJOR glitches in the system. Not if, but when, the doctor is unable to access the medical record, there's NOTHING to go on! This actually happens quite frequently. If there are no "old" chart notes or lab values to go on, how is your doctor going to reliably treat you? I've worked in hospitals where the doctors were furious and frustrated because they couldn't tell what was going on, what prior treatments the patient had had, what medications the patient was taking, what happened with the CT scan. At least with paper records your OLD stuff is available should the system go down. Also, you run into many many doctors who are just plain ignorant about how to use computers, but have way too much ego to admit it or ask for help, so they DON'T even try to find the answers they need in the electronic record to give you the care you need. I'm sorry, I don't believe in the electronic record as either a cost-saving or quality of care system.
- Reply to this comment
