Jaan Sidorov
Posted 4/04/12 on The Disease Management Care Blog
Every practicing physician using an electronic health record (EHR) has seen them. Past diagnosis zombies that stumble endlessly through every encounter record. “Coronary heart disease” that the patient never really had, “diabetes” that was only one possibility among many and a “fracture” that never appeared on any x-ray.
These undead conditions clutter the technology-enabled health system basically because of two EHR value propositions:
Our day-to-day lives were reformatted when the consumer mobile wireless device era, beyond cell phones, was ushered in by iPods in 2001 and followed in short order by Blackberries, smartphones, e-readers, and tablets. Nurturing our peripatetic existence, we could immediately and virtually anywhere download music, books, videos, periodical, games and movies. Television is soon to follow. But these forms of digital communication and entertainment are a far cry from digitizing people.
The past year has seen a huge jump in the number of hours that physicians spend online; at the margin, the increase is due to physicians’ use of online via mobile platforms.
Back in 1987 I spent a while working for a PC dealership, what we now call a Value Added Reseller. I don’t actually recall that the term VAR had been coined at that point, and besides the people I worked for tended to be referred to as “that bunch of bloody cowboys” more often than not.
As an internal medicine physician, I know how hard it was to coordinate patient care across diverse healthcare systems. Primary care providers struggle to keep up with the flow of information coming in and going out of their offices on faxes, couriered documents and hand carried patient notes. The Direct Project was created to address this problem head-on by creating a simple, secure way to send this information electronically, so that providers can concentrate on what counts: excellent patient care.
Care And Cost 