On Tue, 2004-10-05 at 20:11, Calle Hedberg wrote: > Finally, just to put the focus back where it started: One key difference > between countries with far too few doctors - but often easier access to e.g. > admin staff (South Africa has 40% unemployment rate, many of them > matriculants that could fill admin positions) - is that it makes little > sense to increase doctor workload but decrease admin workload. It makes more > sense to do the opposite, and I think that's one reason why most EHR systems > don't work well here - they are tailored for health systems with a much > higher density of doctors. > > So while we might regret excessive brain-drain, it is not likely to change > much in the short term. What needs to change is the design and focus of EHR > systems in societies with already over-loaded health personnel.
These are excellent points, and in such contexts handwriting recognition software is not the issue - rather it is designing paper forms in a way which maximise the ease of use by health care professionals, and minimise transcription errors when admin staff keypunch the information captured on them. There may be lessons to be learnt from other industries which also still thrive on paper forms filled out by clients and sales agents - such as the insurance industry. Has anyone done any R&D into voice recording for health information systems, I wonder? Certainly there are highly developed dictation systems for radiologists and procedural specialists (such as endoscopists) who need a hands-free recording capability. Some of these systems even use voice recognition as opposed to a human typist. I recently borrowed a solid state MP3 player with 256MB of flash memory to record a seminar session with its in-built microphone. I was impressed by the quality of the recording, and many hours could be squeezed on to the device (even more if voice-specific compression algorithms like Speex were used). Might a cheap, ruggedised version of these devices designed specifically for voice recording might find application in healthcare settings in the two-thirds world? -- Tim C PGP/GnuPG Key 1024D/EAF993D0 available from keyservers everywhere or at http://members.optushome.com.au/tchur/pubkey.asc Key fingerprint = 8C22 BF76 33BA B3B5 1D5B EB37 7891 46A9 EAF9 93D0
