How Technology Will Create A Safer Healthcare System

It’s one of those great conundrums. Despite medicine being a highly intellectual field often at the cutting edge of science, we all too often remain near the bottom in terms of our information technology use. Maybe it’s the culture of medicine, a view that one should master everything and do everything despite knowing that this is an impossible goal? Maybe it’s lagging on the part of administration who may not understand the potential role of technology in the daily workflow of their physicians? Or maybe it’s just that we as a profession have never sat down and tried to understand what we’re missing, what we can do, and where we should go with the incorporation of informatics technology?

I choose to believe it is largely the last of these: that we as a profession have not yet began to put proper thought and action to purpose in terms of intelligently using technology to augment our abilities as clinicians. Continue reading

The Electronic Health Record – Where We Are, Where We’re Going

No situation is more devastating to an industry than to be data rich and information poor. Unless we can effectively use our data to get information, then we may as well not even have the data.

There are a variety of EHRs on the market right now – PowerChart, Quadramed, Amazing Charts, SOAPware, to name but a few – and they all do pretty much the same thing – display data about a patient. Essentially, they’ve become a digital version of the paper charts. Sure, they look nicer, are easier to use, and let you quickly find information, but for most purposes, they really don’t do much more than a traditional paper chart does.

So what’s wrong with this picture? Continue reading

Health Informatics

These slides go along with a presentation I put together on health informatics. Included are current concepts of health informatics, applications of the field, prior concepts, mathematics and probability-based systems and emerging concepts.

This presentation is available for download via Slideshare should you wish to reuse materials contained within.

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