« Last night at the ball park | Main | A Place With No Love For Cell Phones »
May 11, 2007
One problem - Three X Rays
On Wednesday evening, a man in an outlying county to Washington D.C. has trouble breathing, dizzyness, goes to his local hospital (Calvert), goes to the ER, gets a chest X-ray in the diagnostic process.
Man is diagnosed with severe heart problems, arrangements are made to move him ASAP to MedStar and Washington Hospital Center early on Thursday morning.
Man gets a bumpy uncomfortable ride to MedStar, arrives in the ER -- one of the best in the D.C. area -- along with his stack of medical records from Calvert, and his first chest X-ray.
MedStar shoots a second chest X-ray shortly after arrival, says this one will be in the "computer system" at Washington Hospital Center. Not that there's a scanner to load in the original X-ray film that would be cheaper and quicker just to scan in the first chest X-ray.
Man is moved upstairs to Coronary Care Unit (CCU) at Washington Hospital Center in an hour or so, admitted, poked, prodded. During process, another technician comes in to attempt to take a THIRD chest X-Ray. Something about the second X-ray not being in the system.
They might have taken a third X-ray later in the day; details are blurry at this point.
It's 2007 and hospitals are, at best, islands of data; at worst, they can't even store and move data from one specialist or primary care physician to an ER in the same building.
Ignore the expense for a moment and just think about the TIME and ENERGY it takes to repeat the same tests. If you want to be paranoid, you can fret about the overexposure to radiation, but frankly, I'm not so sure if that's an issue at this stage of the game...
Verizon is offering their employees an "Electronic Personal Health Records tool." Participating employees can use the tool to store health care information on a password-protected web site, which employees and their designated health care providers can access from anywhere in the world.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I hope Verizon beats a lot of people over the head about interoperability, because it would really be annoying if employees keep one set of records and health care providers stuck to their own islands based upon who owns them.
Posted by dmohney at May 11, 2007 01:51 PM