HITECH Dumpster Diving

There are many reasons why people do or don't use technology tools. Sometimes it's because they don't have access to them. Sometimes it's because no one knows about them. Sometimes it's because they suck.

This applies to EHRs as well as consumer tools. Here's a sampling of what EHRs look like to medical staff. (Image from Juhan Sonin's HealthJam)

As Juhan points out...

These are all patient screens. Where is the patient photo? The giant image of what's ailing them (either a generic series of images of a human's body with highlighted pain points or their actual fMRI/PET scans)?

High Tech, but Useless

Regina Holliday's first medical advocacy mural illustrates what she thinks patient information should look like, based on her experiences with a "high tech" (but dismally useless) EMR.

Regina's husband, Fred (medical depiction above) had advanced kidney cancer. His bones were very fragile. He was subjected to continual "ambulance transports" by medical personnel who were unaware of the fact that he had any broken bones. Actually, the break depicted in his thigh bone (I doubt that's the medical term) was caused by rough handling during one of these "transports."

EHR technology, in and of itself, is pretty much useless. The hospital in which Fred spent many of his last weeks had a computerized "EMR." I imagine it looked like the images at the top of this page. Clinicians probably only put information in there if it is absolutely necessary (like, let's say, for billing).

HITECH $$ to Promote Dumpster Diving?

If you worked at a hospital and needed critical and timely information about a given patient, would you look for it in the EMR? Hospital staff at the above-mentioned hospital apparently used the EMR as an electronic trash can. They routinely dumped information into it, but trying to pull anything useful out of it was about as pleasant as rummaging through a giant garbage dumpster looking for a lost receipt.