HEALTHY ONLINE

EMRs are not designed for patient care. Is there anyone working in health IT who can honestly say that he or she never heard this statement being made hundreds or thousands of times? Is there any clinician actually working with patients and EMRs who can state that such thought never crossed his or her mind? This includes health IT evangelists and physicians spearheading IT initiatives at the most excellent of centers of excellence. People complained that EMRs are not designed for patient care seven years ago, when the first EMR certification body was created. They said the same thing four years ago when billions of dollars were made available for the purchase of EMRs. They kept insisting even as use of EMRs was becoming widespread two years ago, and the chorus remains unchanged today: EMRs are not designed for patient care. Seven years is an eternity in the world of computer technology. Seven years ago Motorola and Blackberry ruled the world and the iPhone was getting ready to be born...

The first President to take a shot at fixing health care was a Bull Moose trying to become President one more time. Unfortunately Teddy Roosevelt failed to win those elections and instead of providing “ protection of home life against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment and old age through the adoption of a system of social insurance ”, America took the low road leading to the Great Depression. Fixing health care was on the minds of all subsequent occupants of the White House, from FDR to Barack Obama , to varying degrees, but as America’s circumstances and character evolved over many decades, so did the understanding of why and how health care should be fixed. For Franklin D. Roosevelt “ [t]he right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health ” were part of a second Bill of Rights to provide security at home for all Americans. It was a lofty attempt to “ assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness ".  FDR failed to implement his pr...

Say you are a pediatrician in an average middle class lily white suburb and most of your little patients are either sitting stiffly in the pews next to you or are elevating your spirits with angelic voices clad in white robes on a blessed Sunday morning. Say little Johnny trips on his way down the altar and ends up taking a ride to the ER to have his forehead stitched. Does the ER doc need to know that the 13 year old altar boy is not a smoker? Does he need to know that Grandpa Joe died from prostate cancer, but other than that the family history is unremarkable? Does the nurse washing Johnny’s forehead need to be informed that the boy has a history of ear infections and had tubes put in when he was 3 years old? Not a fair example, right? Let’s cross the 8 Mile road and look at another Johnny who shows up at the other ER at 2 am with two gunshot wounds to the chest. Does anybody on his care team gives a damn about Mom suffering from depression and diabetes, or the fact that Johnny is a...