Your Medical Care and How IT May Kill You

I just finished reading a very interesting article on how electronic records...mandated for hospitals by the federal government in coming years...nearly killed the author of the article.

I added this blurb for a couple reasons. First, I just spent about four days in the hospital having RNY surgery and I spent nearly a month in a hospital suffering from pancreatitis and gallstones. In both cases, at two different hospitals, I had a consistent experience; I typically saw doctors once or twice a day, and nurses (and their assistants) were on a rotating schedule to check on me and in both cases it was the nurses that made me feel the most comfortable and seemed to be working, from my point of view, as advocates for my care. The author attributed his saving grace to be a nurse who worked on his behalf to correct errors and try getting medication to help him (and his wife sneaking his medications to him).

Second, while his article is a scathing review of the current generation of IT technologies for turning patient healthcare into electronic records, even he acknowledged that the shortcoming isn't necessarily with the IT as much as it is IT vendors not creating systems that fulfill the needs of the doctors. He lays the blame at the feet of the IT departments, vendors, and ISV's who make the varioius software packages.

I would argue that it is not just the vendors, but the users. I don't think they know what they really need or want. Most people, asked to specify what they want in a car, will not know truly all the things they want in the car. I can barely remember all the things I need to take with me on a trip for the weekend. How can most people remember or know all the things they'd need with a system as complex and encompassing as medical software that is supposed to meed the needs of everyone working in the hospital?

Third, in reading his account of what happened to him it seemed as if the doctors "fighting the system"...the poor data model...were still kind of stupid in their actions, computerized list or not. He had several alarms go off that no one replied to. That's not a computer problem. He had people ignoring what he already knew...such as the effectiveness of the Albuterol in alleviating pain...and doctors that simply were not listening. The people "fighting the system" to help the guy were nuts for not listening to the patient in the first place and not exercising good common sense!

Read the article. What do you think?