The New York Times: United States ranks 45th in life expectancy, behind Bosnia and Jordan; near last, compared with other developed countries, in infant mortality; and in last place … among major industrialized countries in health-care quality, access and efficiency.
The mixture of anxious patients with physicians authorized to order a battery of medical tests is a very expensive one. Read more.
I do not understand why an organization that purports to contribute to open source sofware for healthcare need to establish a member-only closed community.
This mashup is an impressive example of the use of Google maps in epidemiology.
I am one of the authors of this paper which was published in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision making today. We present data from interviews with physicians that work in hospitals that no longer keep a paper-based medical record. When physicians are relieved from paper-based information routines, they become more willing to adopt to the Electronic medical record system. As with any other set of clinical skills, they learn how to master the system from their peers. What differs is the inversion of roles: The seniors learn from the juniors. Irrespective of age and seniority, neither physician miss the paper-based medical record. Many routines are however the same, or are changing at a rather slow pace. I do not consider this a bad thing and actually believe that the widespread expectations to EMR systems finally are beginning to be met.
This small piece about the potential negative impact of EHR-systems on Patient safety has recently been published in the Journal of the Norwegian medical association (Norwegian only).
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IBM researchhas recently published a paper on their Hippocratic database. With reference to their declared interestin applying the methods of Open Source to the domain of healthcare IT-system development, I wonder if IBM could be interested in sharing this resource with the health informatics community. If so, I believe the Hippocratic database would foster the development of a vital health informatics open source community that quickly would add value to the application.
See this article in BMC medicine that was published on August 15. The results might be interpreted in this way: Those in most need of electronic attention from their physician have no e-mail address and therefore cannot participate in electronic communication. The introduction of an electronic communications channel reveals the digital divide in a patient population. The digital divide probably co-occurs with social divides.
“From the front line, report from a near paperless hospital: Mixed reception amongst health care professionals” has been accepted for publication in JAMIA. Read the preprint PDF here.
This paper has also been accepted for oral presentation at MIE2006. In this study we have identified, and collected characteristics about clinical department systems (CDSs) at St.Olavs hospital in Trondheim, Norway. A CDS is usually a smaller system tailored to the needs of one or a few clinical departments. We find no trend towards decreased need ore use of CDSs as s consequence of inplementation of a hospital-wide Electronic health record. The functions of the EHR and the CDSs seem to be complementary. Read the PDF here.
