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
Nancy Pelosi holding the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
Meaningful Use has become a less-meaningful phrase in the USA over the past year or so, at least to those of us who work in the ED. Intentionally or no, politicians twist and deform the English language like no others. Their latest target, at least as far as Emergency Department computer systems are concerned, is the phrase: meaningful use.
In this post, I will grossly oversimplify to help provide a basic understanding of what meaning ful use now seems to mean and why you should care. As Bacon observed: we are more likely to reach the truth through error than through confusion.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) contains a vast wealth of provisions to reinvigorate the US economy (no pun intended). Of interest to readers of this site is that the ARRA says that, if you show new meaningful use of electronic medical records, then you can get money from the Federal government. However, this meaningful use only applies to office-based physicians and hospitals, so emergency physicians and Emergency Departments, by themselves, can’t get any money. However, in order for hospitals to get the money, the ED and the emergency physicians have to cooperate – which means you have some power over the administration. (Not too much, though – if you’re too uncooperative they can fire you or terminate your contract. Don’t laugh. It has happened.) Read the rest of this entry
»
