On Wednesday 14 February 2007 07:49, Jon Patrick wrote: > As a tax-payer I have always had a problem with the arguments for the > need for an EHR. I have never heard any case that convinced me that it > would make a difference .. > For me what is missing is a plain English description of what would be > different for me the patient with my health care, not what would be > different for the physician. For example case studies that showed how a > person's care plan materially changed and saved their life because > information was available which would otherwise not be.
You are not practising medicine, obviously. If you would work in both GP and A&E like me, there would hardly be a working day where not at least one expensive diagnostic procedure or test is needlessly duplicated or performed simply because you cannot get timely access to information Some of it just costs time and money (eg ultrasound examinations), some are even harmful to the patient (eg CT scans). If you are a patient (especially in a rural area), it makes the difference between having to travel several hours for an ultrasound or CT scan or not, being exposed to an additional 400 times radiation equivalent of a chest X-Ray or not, between being billed a few hundred dollars by the lab because Medicare rules do not allow certain tests to be repeated more often than certain time intervals (eg HbA1c) etc. Reducing duplicate needless tests and diagnostic procedures alone would already make a nationwide compatible EHR system worthwhile for the taxpayer with in a single election period. But human life is generally regarded even more important than time or money some might say - concrete examples from my own hospital of potentially saved lifes via EHR access: - man with recent anaphylactic reaction to Penicillin about to be treated with Penicillin by a locum who fortunately had access to our surgery records via VPN (the man in question stated just "sulpha" as allergy) - comatous patient brought in by ambulance to our small district hopsital with few diagnostic options. No previous relevant hospital records. VPN access to our surgery records revealed previous episodes with severe hyperkalemia Horst _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
