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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."
The hospital I work for is implimenting a form cycle that allows forms to be printed and scaned back to the EMR. Such a system woudl allow my hospital to use the old paper system but maintain the records electronicly if there was ever a temporary interuption of the EMR.
Secretaries are increasingly like computers.
If you find an old, pre-1950 dictionary and look up "computer", you'll find that it defines "computer" as a person who is employed to do maths. Thousands of computers were employed for the military, large corporations, etc doing ballistics calculations, statistical math, and the like.
There are fewer and fewer human secrtaries, as human secretaries are going the way of the human computer. Electronic computers are superceeding human secretaries just as they obsoleted human computers.
Free Martian Whores!
Funny aside. I happen to know a few physicians pretty well outside their professions. I heard a lovely story involving a surgeon in an office that didn't use paper records. Everything was done through an EMR system.
The "computers were down" as the story was relayed. The surgeon called the family physician asking him about the medical history of the patient. The family doc (primary) asked what was wrong. The surgeon replied that the patient was in the waiting room, but since the EMR system was down, he didn't know anything about the patient. The primary responded with, "By any chance... Did you ask them?" to which the surgeon responded, "What?" The surgeon had a perfectly compus mentus patient, and didn't even bother to ask them a question because the EMR system was down.
Sometimes the lawyers don't even have to be involved for epic failure.
"Unless it's acid-free paper, a book will last maybe fifty years before it starts deteriorating. I have old paperback books I bought when I was young that are nearly unreadable now. Paper is far more nebulous than electronics."
Your old paperbacks are not good examples, as they were =intended= to have short-term durability and be more or less disposable -- similar to today's CDRs. A better comparison from a backup standpoint would be good quality hardbacks.
Here's a 5.25" floppy. It's less than 15 years old. I'd warrant not 1% of the people reading this post have the equipment required to read this once-common format -- assuming, of course, that the data on the disk is still readable, which is highly doubtful.
Conversely, I have here a book published in 1848. It's still perfectly readable to anyone with eyes, no other equipment required.
The problem really is how often one must upgrade the storage media, and how durable it is in the face of failure. Books can burn, but meanwhile they can be copied by anyone with pen and ink. Digital media requires matching hardware just to read it, another set of hardware to print it out, and rigidly regular backups to newer media forms as old ones age out and ultimately become unavailable.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Kinda like how stewardesses are now called flight attendants, even though historically a steward was in no way a menial job. Stewards were probably one of the highest, if not the highest, ranking non-nobles in the household.
My grandmother recently had her gallbladder removed and amusingly enough, the only 'electronic records' issues she had were the nurses who refused to provide things like IV's when they couldn't figure out how to scan the bar code off the bag so it could be tracked (and charged). They held up getting her one by about thirty minutes as they dithered around trying to pull their heads out of their asses and manually entered it into the system.
I absolutely guarantee you that a good portion of the 'paperwork overflow' weren't actual patient care records and were actually inventory control issues where the hospital was worried that an aspirin here or there might go unbilled.
Doctors and nurses know how to operate without electronic records. They know how to keep paper charts, while EHR's have the potential to make them more efficient but they aren't required for the job. Accounting, especially as detailed and 'cost controlled' as a hospital's, is a different story.