Hacker News Reader

Comment by J3L2404 | Hacker News Reader

Some sane form of electronic medical records. The foolishness I've witnessed this last year has been enough to warrant a mandated return to paper charts and clipboards. Until a reliable electronic format can be transferred within and between institutions anyone admitted is at risk.

View on HN

I work in that field as a programmer. From where I'm sitting, I don't see it happening any time soon. This whole field is too much of a mess and it's filled with incompetent people. It's too much of a dinosaur to change though; in my personal opinion.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. The more I work in the healthcare sector, the more I realize that I don't want to work in the healthcare sector.

Indeed: my records at the now dissolved practice of my former GP are inaccessible "because they're electronic" (and they were) or so I was told by a front office worker. I'm sure all of us can figure out the various possibilities that lead to an apparent total data loss.

Nothing important for me was lost but I'm sure many weren't as fortunate.

However, for better or worse, the stimulus package mandated a move to electronic records.

Your records, by law, have a paper copy in a medical records warehouse. Accessing them on short notice is the problem.

According to what law? There should be no reason a doctor with a new practice should need to keep paper copies of their charts. Remote backup copies yes, though I don't know the rule here, but not necessarily paper copies.

Obama's requirement for EMR's is mostly an attempt to save money. Paper records are very expensive, but he can't change the law until the question of reliability is addressed sufficiently, so in the meantime vast warehouses of paper records continue to drain resources. IANAL but I'm sure you can find the law, if you wish to.

HL7 3.0 is a step in the right direction, and hopefully we'll see more modular EMR systems with the new mandates for 'meaningful use.'

My cofounder and I are currently working on a start-up in this area, so I'm curious to what 'foolishness' you've seen.

Foolishness is a harsh word, but when loved ones are involved it tends to get emotional. Some of the problems I've seen are:

1) Tests, often uncomfortable, which were already done, only stopped because I informed the staff that they had been run only hours earlier.

2) Medicines which had been marked as not to be administered due to adverse reactions, readministered due to lack of documentation or notification.

3) Physical disks containing MRI data transferred personally, but utterly useless because of format problems

Did they pull back some of the needless complexity later? I only remember shuddering in 2003 or so when I first saw the drafts, and this was after working on v2!

Bezos invested in http://www.qliance.com/ and they might have simplified much of the required forms customarily requested.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com