I have a lovely pen. It’s a Mont Blanc Meisterstück fountain pen. My group bought it for me on my tenth anniversary as a partner in our emergency medicine practice.
It’s a luxury I would never have paid for myself, though I have loved and used fountain pens since I was in college. Ironically, about the time I got it, the window …
As medicine moves forward in its most technologically advanced era yet, we continue to struggle with basic concepts such as record keeping. The medical record is vital to the care of the patient. It tells the story of each patient’s journey through the medical system. The idea of centralizing all pertinent medical information is, in theory, a step in the right direction. In utopia, there would be one medical record …
Everybody has a shadow. Although as a small child you may have tried, you cannot separate yourself from your shadow no matter what you do. Electronic medical records may be the first tiny step on the road to attaching yet another indivisible part to your persona, a “panoramic, high-definition, relatively comprehensive view of a patient that doctors can use to assess and manage disease”, and this, in the words of …
Does your doctor use a computer in the exam room? Some people think that computers are a great way to keep track of patient information. Others see some advantage, but problems in the implementation. There are also a few Luddites who oppose this change simply on principle. I’ve had good experiences, and bad experiences, and believe we have a long way to go before computers are as helpful as they could be.
There …
I’ve had the luck to attend medical school in the city of San Francisco during what will be looked back on as the start of transformational change in our health care system. My growing interest in technology and new business models as the disruptive forces behind this change, as well as marriage to a technology entrepreneur, has me frequently rubbing elbows with movers and shakers in the digital health space. …
iPads have been introduced into medical education mostly during the pre-clinical years. I’d like to share my experience using an iPad during my clinical year. I’ve found it to be exceedingly useful and versatile.
I have an entire medical library in my pocket. With the touch of a button I can pull up essential texts such as Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine or William’s Endocrinology. I get these books and …
Could a complete stranger receive your echocardiogram results in the mail?
Could a homeless guy in Boston end up with your labs in his shopping cart?
Is it possible that your medical records were sold on eBay?
Yes. Yes. And yes.
On February 24, 2011, Massachusetts General Hospital was fined $1 million dollars by the federal government when an employee inadvertently left a stack of papers on the subway. These documents contained the …
Clinical content refers to the various checklists, documents, and forms that address an area of medicine when using an EHR. For example, a pediatric practice would be interested in documentation tools for a newborn visit. Not all EHRs have clinical content for all areas of medicine. For example, some EHRs have clinical content for internal medicine, but lack the details needed for dermatology or cardiology.
A disturbing number of practices …
I was asked recently to predict the practice of medicine in 20 years. After stating that any such prediction is massively speculative, I indulged because it is massively fun.
I am persuaded by Clayton Christensen’s arguments in The Innovator’s Prescription that healthcare will go the way of other massively disrupted industries, wherein healthcare will follow the arc of decentralization.
Using the music industry as an example, the arc begins …
As if medical practices don’t have enough to worry about with EMR implementation, now they have to decide what kind of EMR system to get: a client-server-based system or a web-based system. The former is the kind that most of us are familiar with. You purchase a computer server, buy a license for the EMR software, install said software on your server, …
by Felasfa Wodajo, MD
The iPad has received a significant amount of attention in the health care arena since its introduction last year.
The attraction is fairly obvious; it is a portable, lightweight, powerful computing device with an intui-tive interface and a large library of built-in applications. In fact, major medical schools such as Read more…
by Graham Walker, MD
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Babel Fish was a fish you stuck in your ear that allowed you to understand any language spoken to you. We’re not far off.
Google recently released a new version of their (free!) Google Translate app for Android phones, featuring conversation mode, which allows you to have a back and forth …
Radiology has transformed into a core subject of medicine, since imaging procedures are getting more and more crucial to clinical decisions. Whether these developments, be it over-diagnosing or unnecessary radiation on the one hand or a more detailed and enhanced way of diagnostics on the other, are …
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Doctors are now incentivized to convert antiquated paper charts to electronic medical records.
Despite a few doctors who love their EMR, most readers here at KevinMD.com are skeptical, as the difficulties in transitioning, along with questionable benefits, have been well chronicled.
Recently, the Washington …
Many doctors roll their eyes whenever patients bring in a stack of research they printed out, stemming from a Google search of their symptoms.
A piece by Zachary Meisel in TIME.com describes a familiar scenario:
The medical intern started her presentation with an eye roll. “The patient in Room 3 had some blood in the toilet bowl this morning and is …
We are a little over two years into our electronic medical records implementation at the time of this writing. Since we have been performing a gradual rollout, the entire process has been relatively uneventful. Most of the credit for this goes to our chief information officer (technospeak for the head of our IT department) and our practice administrator.
One of the biggest challenges we have been facing is how to convert …
by Felasfa Wodajo, MD
Recently, we had the chance to check in with Dr. Henry Feldman. He had posted a detailed summary of his experiences using the iPad as his main interface while rotating on service for a week as a hospitalist at Beth Israel Deaconess hospital (BIDMC) in Boston. Dr. Feldman is also Chief Information Architect for the Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians.
The summary of the …
One in every 10 patients admitted to six Massachusetts community hospitals suffered serious and avoidable medication mistakes. This has created a new urgency for all hospitals in the state to install computerized physician order entry (CPOE).
At BIDMC, we implemented CPOE in 2001 and have not had a handwritten order in most areas, except for the 2 days of our network outage in 2002. Implementing CPOE is challenging and requires …
In family medicine it has been common to keep a “Problem List” in patients’ paper charts. Usually placed on the left hand side, on top of the Medication List, it has given doctors like me an instant thumbnail sketch before considering the specifics of each patient’s visit for that day.
A typical Problem List would include diagnoses like diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol or rheumatoid arthritis. It would list prior surgeries, like …
by Iltifat Husain, Yousif Alkadhi, MD, and Satish Misra
If you’re a physician, medical student, or in any other health care related field, trying to find the best free medical apps for the iPhone is a hassle.
Apps such as “Dream Meanings”, “Relax Ocean waves”, and “Stool Scanner Lite” dominate the Top Free Medical Apps list in the App Store. Our top 10 iPhone medical apps list contains no such app, …
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