On Sun, 2018-11-11 at 20:28 +1100, David wrote: > On Sunday, 11 November 2018 18:12:05 AEDT Karl Auer wrote: > > Regardless of all that, the first thing that must be discarded in > > any design is the "emergency room scenario". > I imagine the ED scenario is probably the one which is most > justified. If the patient record held nothing but current status > regarding allergies, medications, & critical health conditions, and > the medical practice holding the patients records, it would surely be > useful. In any common scenario the patient or their agent will be > perfectly able to interact with the medical staff.
I disagree. And this is why a statement of aims is needed :-) The emergency room scenario is freighted with emotion, unstated expectations, time criticality, life-and-death decisions at their most extreme. It might be politically exciting to announce, but in practice a new system will only add to the load on THE most adrenalin-pumped, overworked, pressured and tired health professionals in the business. And being new it will probably let them down. It is NOT a good candidate for a first excursion into a workable health record :-) And it implies that one goal of the system, in it's first iteration, is support emergency room decisions. That's like building a new widget with the goal of being able, from day one, to use it in Formula One racecars. Ambitious, but pretty much doomed to failure if it's anything more complicated than a decal. More to the point it is not a broadly useful thing to support. The vast majority of medical providers are not emergency room staff. The vast majority of patients are not in emergency rooms. I think there are probably better candidates, but we are seriously jumping the gun. There are much higher-level aims that need to be defined. I reckon a good guiding light would be "to directly improve the health outcomes of people receiving medical treatment in Australia". That would shut out all the crap about law enforcement, the ATO, Centrelink and commercial interests. Complex systems need to be described in very simple terms at the top. Regards, K. -- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Karl Auer ([email protected]) http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer http://twitter.com/kauer389 GPG fingerprint: A0CD 28F0 10BE FC21 C57C 67C1 19A6 83A4 9B0B 1D75 Old fingerprint: A52E F6B9 708B 51C4 85E6 1634 0571 ADF9 3C1C 6A3A _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
