Computers, Medicine, Usability, viewed from the ED
If you're new here, you might like to look through this introduction to the site first.
Are you interested in how computers can reduce medical error?
Did you know that many early medical computer systems increased medical error? (Some current ones, too.)
From your own experience with your own computer at home, do you think that some computers and programs crash on a regular basis? Do you think that most software is hard to use, rude, and frustrating to work with? Based on experience, what you’ve heard, or simple extrapolation, do you suspect that medical computer systems are even worse?
Did you know that the best place to test medical computer systems is the ED, because people working in the ED don’t have the time to deal with bad computer systems, and are intolerant of BS? (If it works in the ED, you can make it work anywhere else in the hospital.)
Do you want to learn more about how to make medical computer systems usable, so as to prevent medical error?
If the answer to any of these questions is “yes,” then read through the Medical Computing series. Although looked at from my viewpoint in the ED, it all applies to medical computer systems wherever they are used, in a hospital, in a clinic or in an office.
If you need a backgrounder on Healthcare IT concepts and terminology, see Healthcare IT in a Nutshell.
There’s also a series of “word” essays that focus on particular and generally more advanced medical computer issues.
To keep up with new postings, you might want to subscribe to my RSS feed.
One final note: Once explained, most of the suggestions on this site seem simple and obvious. But as one is creating a program, or even as one is using a program with a high level of frustration, they are still not obvious until pointed out.
I hope you find the site informative and, perhaps, a bit mind-expandingly entertaining.
Keith Conover, M.D., FACEP
“This job would be great if I didn’t have to chart.” Physicians say this all the time. One way to not have to chart (much) is to work with a Federal Disaster Medical Assistance Team (DMAT) team. Although the National Disaster Medical System now has an electronic medical record (EMR) system, it used to just use scribbling on paper charts. And, since you have sovereign immunity against lawsuits, and you aren’t using your charts for billing, charting could be quite minimal. I have personal knowledge of a medical team in the field, after Hurricane Katrina, in a small, isolated town for a several-hour medical clinic; the team used 8.5×11″ paper on a clipboard for charting, and each patient got one line.
This isn’t feasible for most real-life physician medical charting. We do have to use our charts for billing, and for protection against lawsuits. (“If you didn’t chart it, it wasn’t done.”)
We also are sometimes faced with the demand for charting so that, instead of a narrative string of ASCII text, our charts are a small database of discrete, labeled elements (e.g., Chief Complaint: chest pain. Duration: 1 day.) This latter is known as structured charting, and is eagerly promoted by researchers, who want structured data, and billing companies, who enjoy the resulting ease of assuring compliance with billing and coding rules. Read the rest of this entry
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