Bill Toland writes in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
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American hospitals and doctors have been slow to wholly adopt digital record-keeping and transmitting technology. They spend billions of dollars on the latest MRI machines and CT scanners, and plenty more on billing, scheduling, payroll and so on. Hospitals, obviously, are generally teeming with computers.
Why, then, at the point of patient intake, are you asked by a receptionist, then a nurse, then a doctor, whether you’re on any medication or have any allergies?
Why does your primary care physician still thumb through a manila folder, inspecting somebody else’s handwriting, when he’s trying to remember how your respiratory infection was treated the last time you visited? Why do hospital physicians still scribble a prescription on a notepad, then send it via courier or vacuum tube to the pharmacy downstairs, when it would be so much faster to do it wirelessly?
“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” said Dr. G. Daniel Martich, the chief medical information officer for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, which is recognized among peers as a leader in the adoption of health care IT. “It’s amazingly time-consuming and a lot of it can be incredibly expensive. And unfortunately there are many points where you can miss.”
UPMC alone uses 120 computer programs — “clinical applications” — from almost as many software and hardware vendors. Different systems use different vocabularies when they’re talking about the same drugs, making translation software a necessity. The vendors themselves, usually for-profit companies, want to sell their own wares, and can be reticent to play ball with another company, Dr. Martich said. That forces hospitals, UPMC included, to design their own tools.
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Full story – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette