On Monday 09 June 2003 08:58, Thomas Beale wrote:

> ...  THe paradox is that the GP may
> be helping to make some of the most important decisions for
> the patient, even if it is just deciding when they should see
> a certain kind of specialist or when their lifestyle _really_
> needs attention etc - but - they usually have the most basic,
> least secure and least integrated health record systems of all
> care-givers in the system. 

Tom,

In the UK that is so far from the situation that you are 
describing an inversion.

GP here is so far ahead of hosptial/specialty systems as to be a 
continuing cause of embarrassment.

The major drag-factor on GP system development is the need to 
handle the stream of scraps of paper with inconsistent details 
of patients who are probably the same that arrive at wildly 
unpredictable times and at any of the several locations the 
various address books in the hospitals hol for the current GP 
for the paitent they think they are dealing with.

I suppose one can describe the IT system in a cardiac catheter 
lab as sophisticatd or advanced, but truly it is embedded, and 
the chance it talks to the system in the lab next door is 
currently around nil.


-- 
From the Linux sofa or garden swing of Dr Adrian Midgley 
http://www.defoam.net/             

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