As any reader of this site will note, I am very interested in the information technology aspects of healthcare. There is no question that governing powers see HIS/HIT as a solution to our difficulties with medical costs and quality. However, as important as these systems will be in helping provide long term solutions, I have [...]
Archive for the ‘Hospital IT’ category
The Power of Teamwork
May 4, 2010Order Sets
April 17, 2010Now that my hospital has committed to implementing an enterprise Electronic Health Record (EHR) that will include Computer Physician Order Management we face the daunting task of converting over 300 paper-based order sets into the electronic format. The project team overseeing this process faces two challenges that have the potential of derailing the the project’s [...]
Clinical Dashboards
April 15, 2010In follow up to my post on Amalga, I wanted to make everyone aware of an upcoming webinar sponsored by Healthcare IT News. Parrish Medical Center has been able to reduce mortality by more than 30% and reduce non-ICU “code blues” by more than 76%, using the Thomson Reuters application Clinical Xpert CareFocus. These are [...]
iPad and Healthcare
April 10, 2010Dr. John Halamka at Life as a Healhcare CIO wrote back in January his impressions of the iPad. His criteria for the ideal clinical device is exactly right. In this first week of commercial availability I’ve seen two iPads in use at the hospital. One of our physicians, a self admitted technophile, had bought one [...]
iPhone and Healthcare
April 7, 2010I use my iPhone regularly when rounding because of the medical app’s it provides – ePocrates, ACLS, Google search, etc. It works well as a clinical decision support tool because it’s wonderfully portable and is always connected to a network. This is a far cry, however, from using the iPhone as an extension of an [...]
eHospital?
March 30, 2010My post on Amalga Hospital Information Systems generated a fair amount of interest and I was asked to expand somewhat on why I believe this is an important initiative. Let me tell you a story. I was working on the in-patient medicine service late last year when I noted a new patient had been admitted [...]
Microsoft Amalga
March 25, 2010The hospital I work for has recently contracted with Microsoft to begin exploring how health care organizations can begin applying the Amalga Hospital Information System to the clinical aspects of patient care. Like almost every hospital in the United States, we struggle with the fact that our patient information is stored across disparate databases. This is the result [...]
Hospital IT Challenges
October 10, 2007I was recently elected to chair my hospital’s EMR committee. There are several challenges the IT department faces, not the least of which is getting physicians on board with changes that have to be made. The Scobleizer interviews Dr. Christopher Longhurst where he presents a nice summary of the issues involved. The short version (just [...]
