How Hospitals Are Planning To Go Electronic By 2011

Hospitals are where millions of lives are saved everyday, so shouldn’t they be the ones that are the most technologically advanced? That’s a question that the government asked when they supplied hospitals nationwide $30 Billion Stimulus dollars to switch to electronic records instead of the good old pen and paper. They are also offering doctors bonus payments if they cross the finish line to electronic by 2011. This is going to be hard on the hospitals, the government, and the doctors themselves but going in without a plan is just asking for chaos. So, here are three IT systems that are currently being tested in hospitals nationwide:

1. Laptops For Taking Notes

The University of Virginia hired a group of scribes, armed with laptops to follow doctors and patients around to take notes on what they say. They wrote down things like medicine, dosage, how the patient interacts with the doctor, any medical problems or side effects. This method would make a hospital more faster and efficient at keeping and digging up a patients medical history and would eventually help them go 100% electronic. Although this is a great step to go about making a hospital paperless, a scribe is likely to make far more mistakes then the average doctor and that could be risky when it comes to a person’s health.

2. Patient Charts on the iPhone

Stanford Hospital has implemented a plan combining the technology of Apple and Epic Systems. This allows doctors to view a patient’s chart right on the iPhone and makes it a lot easier to quickly view and send the patient’s medical condition and personal information to other doctors faster, and much more efficiently. You may ask, why this isn’t in all hospitals already? Well, the patient’s privacy and security is a big issue when using the iPhone. The touchscreen makes for easy mistakes and the fact that a patient’s medical info is in an app next to email, Facebook, and Twitter doesn’t help either.

3. Blackberry’s Used as Pagers

The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center replaced all pagers from doctors with high tech Blackberry’s that can do a lot more than just beep the doctor. The Blackberry’s keep the all of the doctor’s on the same page , and also allow the ambulance to send out EKG’s of the patients condition before they even go into the ER, letting the doctor get ready for whats ahead. The only problem with this idea would have to be the same reasons why an iPhone can’t be used, privacy and health risks. Phones in general are a great way to stay connected with the patient’s files but are very risky at the same time.

(via FastCompany)