Hospital Turns Away Ambulances When Computers Go Down

CurtMonash writes "The Indianapolis Star reports that Tuesday Morning, Methodist Hospital turned away patients in ambulances, for the first time in its 100-plus history. Why? Because the electronic health records (EHR) system had gone down the prior afternoon — due to a power surge — and the backlog of paperwork was no longer tolerable. If you think about that story, it has a couple of disturbing aspects. Clearly the investment in or design of high availability, surge protection, etc. were sadly lacking. But even leaving that aside — why do problems with paperwork make it necessary to turn away patients? Maybe the latter is OK, since there obviously were other, more smoothly running hospitals to send the patient to. Still, the whole story should be held up as a cautionary tale for hospitals and IT suppliers everywhere."

Comments

Re:More-words answer.

[plague3106]

Sorry, it's just not practical. Even with record keeping, hospitals still eat a lot of cost. Eat some more, and they will soon have no money to pay doctors, nurses, buy equipment, medicine, non-latex gloves, etc. This is why socialized medicine is bad for everyone... it just costs a lot, and care doesn't improve.

Also, mistakes from NOT having accurate paper work can be worse than treating the patient.

Re:More-words answer.

[TrebleJunkie]

Well, we'd still have to document everything pretty much the same -- you can (and do) still have payment/service disputes with self-pays, too.

Mind you, I do agree that Health Care would be better suited if it were allowed to be a (cash) business like any other, but as long as you have lousy, mooching, wealth-bashing ingrates who think that health care is something to which they're entitled (they're not.), such as the rest of those replying to this sub-thread, that will never happen.

Were the Health Care market (more) free (as in speech, not as in beer), you wouldn't have the problem with Health Care that you now do -- that is, that Health Care has effectively priced most of its consumers (customers) out of the market. Health Care has no incentive to innovate and develop low-cost products and services.