by Donald Burt, MD
Many hospital CIOs face an uphill battle winning the hearts, minds and fingers of physicians. It’s not because doctors are technology phobic. Quite the opposite: physicians are some of the most ravenous consumers of new information technology. Smartphones and tablets are becoming as ubiquitous as stethoscopes at many hospitals.
The truth is doctors are happy to make screen touches, mouse clicks and keyboard strokes if the application is …
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Physicians love a CIO who lets them focus on patients, not technology
by Diana E. Lee
Some are free, others are not, but there are some great, off the beaten path apps on this list that are well worth downloading to your iPhone.
1. iHeadache (free version, with ads).This app isn’t bad, but I did find some features less than ideal. You’re limited to their list of symptoms, which may not include all of your symptoms. It didn’t include all of mine, …
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iPhone medical apps for patients with migraine headaches
Adoption of electronic health records (EHR) systems remains a challenge, both for hospitals as well as for physicians in ambulatory practice. The process of adoption, implementation, and meaningful use of EHRs (let us keep in mind) is actually quite different between those two setting.
Much has been written concerning EHR adoption within hospitals. Much of the experience in computerized physician order entry (CPOE) comes from hospital EHR adoption, and many of …
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EHR implementation in the ambulatory or hospital setting
One of the most promising uses of Electronic Health Records (EHR) is research.
As EHRs become more and more widespread and the clinical data previously held in silos of paper charts becomes fluid, exchangeable and duly collected, large clinical repositories should emerge and be made available to those engaged in research, presumably medical research. The results of such research are expected to help us identify cost effective therapies, health care trends …
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EHR data is currently ill suited for clinical research
Electronic health record (EHR) systems are big news (and big money) these days.
Our government is pushing adoption and “meaningful use” of EHR systems because computerizing patient-specific clinical information can benefit our nation’s health care system. The primary focus has been on the benefit to the care of individual patients, but computerizing patient-specific clinical information can also benefit other parties in the health care system.
I believe that there are 6 major …
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Who benefits from computerization of patient-specific clinical information?
by John Rossheim
To many physicians, it may appear self-evident that electronic records will improve the patient experience. After all, the doctor has speedier access to notes, labs and other patient data, and that’s got to increase the patient’s confidence in the doctor’s understanding of his health status.
But whether patient records are confined to a private-practice EMR or live in an EHR system, the usefulness of …
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How to improve patient satisfaction with electronic records
I love computers. Really, I do. Despite my oft-repeated claims about the shortcomings of electronic medical records in their current form, I do believe that information technology has the potential to be of great help to me and other physicians in providing quality care to Americans.
Stop laughing. I really mean it.
I do not believe, however, that IT best serves the medical needs of our patients when …
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A modest proposal for a truly useful EMR
We have an intuitive sense of what is meant by those urging medicine to “go digital.” It seems to refer to modernizing, becoming more flexible, and basically following the path of modern computing and information technology.
Is it useful to think more rigorously than this hazy conception, without necessarily reading a special report from The Economist?
Digital information is special because it can be transmitted to and instantiated within any number of …
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Explore information technology and safely digitize medicine
A guest column by the American College of Physicians, exclusive to KevinMD.com.
by John Tooker, MD, MBA, MACP
The recently enacted American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA, 2009) and Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA, 2010) contain provisions that, if implemented, will fundamentally change the way that medicine will be practiced in the future.
As I indicated in a …
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ACP: Clinical decision support – is it time?
by Kal Shah
Kal Shah, a first year medical student at the University of California Irvine who received his undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley in Bioengineering, has given iMedicalApps the scoop on how the iPad is being used by himself and classmates.
He highlights how medical textbooks are being utilized, along with an app he feels is better at note taking than the popular Read more…
How an iPad is replacing medical textbooks
by Lucas Restrepo, MD
There is only one fundamental problem with American medicine: its progressive commercialization.
Every other problem derives from it centrifugally. Medicine, wrote William Osler, is “a calling, not a business.” Patients are not clients, nor physicians businessmen. People do not spend over a decade studying medicine ―living years in poverty or overburdened with debt― merely hoping to get rich. While it is perfectly …
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Progressive commercialization of American medicine
Recently, I had my first visit with my new primary care doctor.
I picked him based on recommendations (plus he’s one of the few that accepts my insurance), and also because he seemed to be an eager adopter of electronic medical records (EMR). On his website, there was a portal for making appointments on-line, asking questions of the doctor and staff by e-mail and once a registered patient, I could also …
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Physician barriers to EMR acceptance
EMR software is a data repository for clinicians. Rather than being just a simple database, what would the ideal software package look like? What exactly is the perfect electronic medical record?
Every clinician that interacts with the medical record has a specific need. Whether that is an emergency physician which is looking to track down a specific problem or a family practice physician who is looking to keep track of hundreds …
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What the perfect EMR would look like
At “Background On The ‘Ecosystem’ of Commercial Healthcare IT” I wrote:
… In reading about HIT difficulties it is important to understand the “ecosystem” of commercial health IT, that is, the identity and nature of the principal constituents and stakeholders, and their interrelationships. Familiarity with this environment is useful in order to place the social and organizational issues affecting HIT diffusion in the proper context.
By implication, I made the case that the …
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The commercial health IT ecosystem and its implications for patients
As State Health Information Exchanges and Federal efforts (NHIN Connect/NHIN Direct) implement the data sharing technology that will enable all providers in the country to achieve Meaningful Use Stage 1, I’m often asked “but when will this healthcare information exchange technology be able to retrieve all my records from everywhere when I’m lying unconscious in the Emergency Department and cannot give a history?”
Here are …
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What meaningful use stage 1 will mean to patients
The recent financial incentives offered by the government (HITECH) for EMR implementation are somewhat helpful but are also misleading.
Most fail to recognize that the biggest obstacles to EMR implementation are not financial, but are cultural. EMR adoption will require cooperation between two disparate cultures: the Health IT (HIT) culture and the medical culture. One needs only to read a few of the EMR debates in any health care blog to …
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Health IT and doctors need to bridge the cultural gap
Five years ago my associate and I invested sixty thousand dollars to purchase and set up an electronic health record system and eliminate extensive paper use.
We researched all available systems and decided upon MediNotes because it was a large company with an excellent record of service and their system met all the national requirements for certification. We worked through our local computer vendor’s family …
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A better system is needed to migrate to electronic health records
A recent report in the Annals of Internal Medicine on the characteristics of prescriptions that are abandoned at the pharmacy raise the question of (1) how to ensure that people actually pick up their prescriptions, and (2) how to make sure that people actually take the medications that are prescribed.
What role does modern Electronic Health Record (EHR) technology play in this question?
A study by the non-profit New England Healthcare Institute …
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Electronic health records (EHR) to improve medication compliance
Every day millions of Americans and billions of people around the globe are routinely accepting colorful pieces of paper in return for their labor and placing those hard earned possessions in modern glass buildings whose owners they do not know.
It took a few hundred years to change how business transactions are conducted, but today, there is very little apprehension about depositing one’s wealth in a bank. Public trust in both …
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Trust your life records to an unnamed chain of software vendors
