"The vast majority of patients are able to converse with their doctors, usually in a practice they've been going to for years, and MHRecord is then just more paperwork"
The vast majority of patients are unable to reliably convey diagnoses, whether they corpus mentus or not. They can usually converse about their symptoms but patients with reliable memory of explicit diagnoses are atypical. This may not apply equally young educated middle class people. Do you serious expect a 70 year old with multiple comorbidities who has just had a fall to remember all their conditions and allergies? "I have a heart condition" is a help, but the actual heart condition out of a couple of hundred is more useful. It may rule out therapies that are otherwise the best option. cf something we hear in IT: "There's something wrong with my computer." Jim Jim On Mon, 12 Nov 2018 at 11:04, David <dloch...@key.net.au> wrote: > On Sunday, 11 November 2018 22:24:30 AEDT Karl Auer wrote: > > > The emergency room scenario is freighted with emotion, unstated > expectations, time criticality, life-and-death decisions at their most > extreme. [...] > > It's also the place where it's critical to know the allergies, drug > regimes, and co-morbidities of patients who are quite often not in a fit > state to communicate reliably. Administering a drug to a patient who is > hyper-sensitive to it for one reason or another can result in death. > > > And it implies that one goal of the system, in it's first iteration, is > support emergency room decisions. [...] Ambitious, but pretty much doomed > to failure if it's anything more complicated than a decal. > > Well no, I was suggesting that as an example of a system which would be > achievable and useful in practice, not as the first iteration of some grand > ediface. > > > 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. > > Precisely! The vast majority of patients are able to converse with their > doctors, usually in a practice they've been going to for years, and > MHRecord is then just more paperwork. > > > 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. > > That wouldn't cut out the crap. The ATO, Centrelink, and the police are > attracted to MHRecord because of the honey-pot of other information it > might contain about individuals. The only way to guarantee to eliminate > that problem is to eliminate the honey-pot. Of course we might do it by > rigorously enforcing access restrictions, but then we get a politician like > Peter Dutton... > > > Complex systems need to be described in very simple terms at the top. > > Yes, but there's a direct relationship between the very simple description > and the number of vested interests, ideas about system objectives, and > committee sizes bought to bear on implementation, and of course on the > final cost of the resulting monument. > > Cheers! > David L. > > _______________________________________________ > Link mailing list > Link@mailman.anu.edu.au > http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link > _______________________________________________ Link mailing list Link@mailman.anu.edu.au http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
