Today’s article is written and brought to you by Dr. Drussia of Medisyn
Part I
The single most important tool in the clinician’s arsenal-access to other attending to other attending clinicians’ clinical information- has been lost in the debate about increased spending, stimulus packages, interoperability, the definition of EHR and the meaning of “meaningful use”.
The high cost of the transaction of access to clinical information has hobbled the efficient practice of medicine.
Without access to other clinicians’ information, attending clinicians must make diagnostic and therapeutic decisions in a vacuum. This leads to redundent testing, unnecessary hospital admissions, prolonged hospital admissions, undetected drug abuse, higher costs of administration, undiscovered fraud, spotty quality assurance, measurement of claims data as a substitute for measuring clinical activity and the possibility of not being able to discover best practice activity because it is lost in paper charts in small practices.
The piece that is missing is the clinician to clinician interaction-the extraordinary sharing of clinical acumen and experience that all clinicians experience in medical training when they are surrounded by medical student peers, interns, pharmacists, nurses, ARNPs, therapists, residents and attending physicians who all stood at the foot of the patient’s bed and discussed, refined and pooled clinical information.
This congress of treating ventolin vendita online professionals represents the optimal way to share clinical information, create an agreed upon list of diagnoses with allergies and formulate an agreed upon treatment plan. Having access to this common diagnostic and medication list allows all additional clinicians and treatment specialists maximal opportunity for reference, further opportunity for refinement of diagnoses and treatment, avoidance of redundant testing and unnecessarily prolonged admissions and efficient treatment plans without unwanted interrogation of the patient-the usual repository of these two lists at current sites of care.
The high cost of inaccessible clinical information-lost charts- in closed, after-hours offices, in the assembly area of medical records, waiting for signatures in medical record chart rooms- adds to the immense currently uncounted cots in the healthcare enterprise today.
The power of the Internet information conduit has not been fully realized in the design of the pre-Internet commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software packages offered by EMR vendors today. The high cost of the transaction of access to inaccessible clinical information is not a part of the metrics offered by the practice management and hospital systems. These are the primary reasons why these currently available COTS have not offered any significant return on investment to the medical practices of busy clinicians.
Stay Tuned for Solutions- Part II
