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Hospital Turns Away Ambulances When Computers Go Down
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu Jun 04, 2009 09:17 AM
from the oh-that's-not-good dept.
from the oh-that's-not-good dept.
CurtMonash writes "The Indianapolis Star reports that Tuesday Morning, Methodist Hospital turned away patients in ambulances, for the first time in its 100-plus history. Why? Because the electronic health records (EHR) system had gone down the prior afternoon — due to a power surge — and the backlog of paperwork was no longer tolerable.
If you think about that story, it has a couple of disturbing aspects. Clearly the investment in or design of high availability, surge protection, etc. were sadly lacking. But even leaving that aside — why do problems with paperwork make it necessary to turn away patients?
Maybe the latter is OK, since there obviously were other, more smoothly running hospitals to send the patient to. Still, the whole story should be held up as a cautionary tale for hospitals and IT suppliers everywhere."
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Nurse != Secretary (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nurse != Secretary (Score:5, Interesting)
Secretaries are increasingly like computers.
If you find an old, pre-1950 dictionary and look up "computer", you'll find that it defines "computer" as a person who is employed to do maths. Thousands of computers were employed for the military, large corporations, etc doing ballistics calculations, statistical math, and the like.
There are fewer and fewer human secrtaries, as human secretaries are going the way of the human computer. Electronic computers are superceeding human secretaries just as they obsoleted human computers.
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Re:Nurse != Secretary (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Nurse != Secretary (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Nurse != Secretary (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Nurse != Secretary (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot, Slashdot, home to so many misogynists :(
Really? I never saw him mention women once in that post. Which raises a far more disturbing thought...
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Re:Nurse != Secretary (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, secretaries are reverting to their original function, except that the job title has changed to Personal Assistant. A secret-ary was an assistant who was entrusted with your secrets (hence Secretary of State, Foreign Secretary). The job title that typists and data-entry staff should have had was "clerk" (if not typist or data-entry clerk). But secretary was more prestigious, and a good job title always helps keeping people satisfied with low pay. The people who were unable to perform their function in this hospital when the computers died were data-entry clerks.
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Re:Nurse != Secretary (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Nurse != Secretary (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Nurse != Secretary (Score:4, Insightful)
Nurse != Secretary (Score:1)
I think this has more to do with Management not being able to properly bill insurance companies. Because profit is more important than human lives.
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Re:Nurse != Secretary (Score:5, Insightful)
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As a former EMT (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nurse != Secretary (Score:5, Informative)
A monopoly, of any kind, is a bad idea. Imagine the DMV or Amtrak running your hospitals - no thanks. I prefer the freedom of choice where if I don't like Country General I can go visit St. Josephs instead. If they are crap I can to to John Hopkins or Mt. Sinai or any other place within driving difference.
Unless the pain in your abdomen is so intense, you ARE GOING to the closest hospital no matter who runs them, because you don't know what's going on and whether you have time to go to the next one.
We were in that situation about a year and a half ago. There's a Catholic Healthcare West hospital just a mile from our house. CHW played a large role in my cousin's death, and given all the lawsuits pending against them for their billing practices, I had vowed never to darken their door. But when my husband had a kidney stone (and we had no idea what was going on), and the next hospital was several more miles away, I took him to the closest ER anyway.
That's why healthcare is a market failure. There is not perfect access, or anything even approaching it. You cannot make informed decisions based on quality of service and cost and all that when you think you might be dying. You'll go wherever's closest, no matter HOW badly they do their job, if you think that they're at least basically competent WRT lifesaving.
BTW, JC Penney has much better quality than Macy's. You might try "Nordstrom" in that last slot.
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Re:Nurse != Secretary (Score:4, Insightful)
Take that up with your HMO, then. Bureaucrats are running healthcare RIGHT NOW, except with hardly anyone to answer to, and a mandate that runs counter to what their customers (businesses) and suppliers (doctors) actually want.
Speaking as someone who has worked as a provider in for-profit healthcare, I'll take a government bureaucrat over a corporate bureaucrat any day. If it's like the DMV (the canonical example) it would be the choice between someone who doesn't give a crap whether I get what I want, versus someone who has a vested interest in my not getting what I want.
There were as many people in the billing and finance department as there were in the clinical staff. If you count the billing and finance people up the chain, there were far more bureaucrats than healthcare providers involved in my clients' care.
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Re:Nurse != Secretary (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually how about eliminating the problem itself ? If the paperwork is overwhelming, with a reasonable minimum workforce present in the hospital, the government (the recipient of said paperwork),
I work for a non-profit healthcare provider, where 94% of our patients are below 200% of the Federal Poverty Level. Most of *our* paperwork does go to the government... the County as part of the Public-Private Partnership fund, the State as part of OAPP, the Feds as part of our FQHC billing, etc. (Only about 17% of our patients even have Medicaid or Medicare). A lot of that paperwork also goes to our private funders; foundations and corporations that donate to specific programs and then expect us to report on our results.
But for most hospitals and doctor's offices, most of that paperwork is for billing private insurance companies. A fraction is for billing public insurance for those without private. Some is sent straight to the patient. A lot is for accreditation and patient records, too (and The Joint Commission is a private, non-profit entity... they are who is usually accrediting hospitals and ambulatory care).
needs to accept the fact that there isn't any paperwork, and foot the bill anyway.
As mentioned above, they're not generally footing the bill.
Obviously this will present docters with patients without medical records. But better to be treated a bit worse than not at all.
It's not "a bit worse." Incomplete or inaccurate medical records kill thousands of people every year, and many more suffer permanent or temporary injury as a result. Giving me or my son certain common antibiotics via IV can kill me. Medical records are EXTREMELY important, because people are very different from each other.
Obviously any sort of national healthcare system will preclude having this common-sense approach, as any system that does not make it the responsibility of the patient to ensure medical bills are paid will ration health care ("total health care resources" are limited. Either you let people pay for them, or you ration them). Rationed health care means "no government approval, no healthcare" both in theory and in practice.
I really don't know where this keeps coming from. Obviously, just like every private insurance company in creation, a government-run health plan would also decide what was worth the money and what wasn't. This does not currently and could not in the future prevent people from paying out of pocket if they think it's worth it. I'm not sure how people get from "government provides health care" to "government prohibits the purchase of health care by private entities."
It is very true that, when confronted with the incredible costs of certain treatments and medications that are declined for coverage, people find themselves unable or unwilling to pay. It's therefore unlikely that people will just pay out-of-pocket for those services which are not covered. This does not mean they are prevented from doing so by legislation; it simply means that the person footing the bill is likely to weigh the situation differently.
[wtf is up with /. formatting today? I've tried everything to put line breaks in the right places, but it keeps running paragraphs together anyway. Bah.]
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Re:Nurse != Secretary (Score:5, Informative)
I was an EMT and LPN in the Air Force, back in late 80's and worked 2 years in military and VA hospitals. While there were computerized records, the actual treatment notes stayed on a clipboard that was on the end of the patient's bed. Any pre-existing issues were also noted there.
The dangers of treatment without prior records sounds pretty tenuous. I wonder if this has more to do with the dangers of not being able to bill 'accurately'? Nicest thing about working in a socialized medical system (military medicine is set up as such) was not having to worry about every nickel and dime. Doctors I spoke with liked it, even though they were paid a lot less than they would be in civilian practice. They didn't have to worry about office expenses, insurance, etc. and didn't have HMO's second guessing their work and suggesting cost-saving measures.
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Re:Nurse != Secretary (Score:5, Interesting)
My grandmother recently had her gallbladder removed and amusingly enough, the only 'electronic records' issues she had were the nurses who refused to provide things like IV's when they couldn't figure out how to scan the bar code off the bag so it could be tracked (and charged). They held up getting her one by about thirty minutes as they dithered around trying to pull their heads out of their asses and manually entered it into the system.
I absolutely guarantee you that a good portion of the 'paperwork overflow' weren't actual patient care records and were actually inventory control issues where the hospital was worried that an aspirin here or there might go unbilled.
Doctors and nurses know how to operate without electronic records. They know how to keep paper charts, while EHR's have the potential to make them more efficient but they aren't required for the job. Accounting, especially as detailed and 'cost controlled' as a hospital's, is a different story.
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Welcome to the paperless office (Score:5, Insightful)
please bring your own toilet paper.
But seriously... this is one of the biggest problems with the "paperless" society. Yes, it's nice to have electronic copies of things, but magnetically-stored data (or even optically-stored data) degrades far faster than a paper copy.
We can try and try to hope otherwise, but at the end of the day I worry we're dooming ourselves with our "modernized" recordkeeping. Sure, we have "tidbits" of things from 1000,2000,3000,4000 years ago... but 1000 years from now, most of our own records - much like the oral histories of certain societies that didn't get heavily into good recordkeeping on more solid forms - may well be completely gone.
Most records are worthless anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of our records would be worthless in a hundred years. Actually, most of them are nearly worthless in a year. Would it really matter to somebody in the future that I spend $15.19 on June 1st at Lulu.com, for example? Because record keeping is so cheap compared to historical examples, we keep a bunch of records nobody would have bothered with in the past.
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Re:Most records are worthless anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
it implies that the more technologically advanced an ancient culture was, the less evidence there will be that they ever existed.
Woah easy there cowboy. This "rule" only applies to historical data of the society, not general evidence. If my hard drive crashes or gets wiped, the drive itself, in its sturdy metal casing, will be around for many, many years to come. So no, L. Ron Hubbard remains a douche.
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Re:Most records are worthless anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
I suspect that's a mirage, caused by only seeing the durable pieces of older cultures. We can see the Roman Colosseum. We cannot see, in most cases, the papyrus business contracts.
Some of our things, such as records, are very ephemeral. Others, such as satellites and nuclear waste, are very durable.
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Re:Welcome to the paperless office (Score:5, Insightful)
They've been talking about the "paperless office" for over twenty years now, but it hasn't happened yet. There is far more paper in my office than there was 20 years ago, in fact.
However, IINM the Japanese have paperless toilets that wash your butt with a water spray and dry it with hot air.
The thing about electronic records is that they can be instantly duplicated and sent anywhere instantly. They're easy to back up, without the errors and degredation of past, analog copying methods.
I'm healthy and don't go to the doctor very often. My old family doctor retired about fifteen or so years ago, and when I went to have butthole surgery (hemmoroids, too much sitting on my ass like any nerd) I discovered that I had no medical records!
Unless it's acid-free paper, a book will last maybe fifty years before it starts deteriorating. I have old paperback books I bought when I was young that are nearly unreadable now. Paper is far more nebulous than electronics.
The thing that will kill today's literature (and many other records) for future humanity isn't the supposed fragility of electronic records, but the insane lengths of copyright. If you don't allow electronic copies of your work, it's unlikely to last much longer than a single human generation.
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Re:Welcome to the paperless office (Score:5, Interesting)
"Unless it's acid-free paper, a book will last maybe fifty years before it starts deteriorating. I have old paperback books I bought when I was young that are nearly unreadable now. Paper is far more nebulous than electronics."
Your old paperbacks are not good examples, as they were =intended= to have short-term durability and be more or less disposable -- similar to today's CDRs. A better comparison from a backup standpoint would be good quality hardbacks.
Here's a 5.25" floppy. It's less than 15 years old. I'd warrant not 1% of the people reading this post have the equipment required to read this once-common format -- assuming, of course, that the data on the disk is still readable, which is highly doubtful.
Conversely, I have here a book published in 1848. It's still perfectly readable to anyone with eyes, no other equipment required.
The problem really is how often one must upgrade the storage media, and how durable it is in the face of failure. Books can burn, but meanwhile they can be copied by anyone with pen and ink. Digital media requires matching hardware just to read it, another set of hardware to print it out, and rigidly regular backups to newer media forms as old ones age out and ultimately become unavailable.
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Your floppy is not a good example (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the whole strength of digital media is that you can easily copy/regenerate it. If the data is important, it isn't difficult to keep transferring it to new formats. For that matter, it isn't difficult even if the data isn't important. I have papers I wrote back in high school, well over a decade ago. The original computer on which they were written is long gone to a landfill, but I can transfer the data to new drives as often as I like.
Now can your book be copied? Sure, but only with a good deal of effort. Even if you are using a machine to make the copies it is a hell of a lot more work than copying digital data. If you are doing it by hand, it is a major marathon. So even though the book CAN be copied, it is much less likely for it to actually BE copied.
Digital also has the advantage of not having physical boundaries. You can easily copy digital data to anywhere in the world that is wired. If you need to back something up against an extreme catastrophe, like a city getting burned down or something, this is easy to do. For paper, much harder. You have to truck it to where it needs to go and do so regularly.
So yes, there is lots of digital data out there with very little permanence, but that is because there is lots of digital data out there with very little relevance. The amount of information we generate today as compared to the pre digital age is staggering. It is thus no surprise that we keep much less of it.
However because it is so much easier to back up, we can back up much more data as is needed, and do so in a much more reliable fashion. Paper seems great until you consider the amount that we know has been lost on paper (massive numbers of Mayan codicies for example) and consider that there's even more we are never aware of (because it was lost and no documentation of the loss was made).
If you sniff around on the Internet, you'll find that there are archives of plenty of old data, data that shipped on floppies or punch card or tape and so on. The data has been copied and recopied and is preserved.
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A one word answer (Score:5, Insightful)
"But even leaving that aside - why do problems with paperwork make it necessary to turn away patients?"
Lawyers.
More-words answer. (Score:5, Informative)
Lawyers, patient safety, and actually getting paid. Vast amounts of documentation must be provided to Medicare/Medicaid and Insurance companies in order to get paid for services. Event the smallest amount of missing or inaccurate documentation can be the difference between getting paid $5 and $5000, the difference between getting paid and getting fined and losing your ability to bill Medicare, etc...
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Re:More-words answer. (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, getting paid is more important than human lives.
This seems to contradict the mission statement of the hospital industry as it was conceived, but I think is a good indicator of where insurance-driven (which is to say, privately socialized) medicine is headed.
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Re:A one word answer (Score:5, Interesting)
The "computers were down" as the story was relayed. The surgeon called the family physician asking him about the medical history of the patient. The family doc (primary) asked what was wrong. The surgeon replied that the patient was in the waiting room, but since the EMR system was down, he didn't know anything about the patient. The primary responded with, "By any chance... Did you ask them?" to which the surgeon responded, "What?" The surgeon had a perfectly compus mentus patient, and didn't even bother to ask them a question because the EMR system was down.
Sometimes the lawyers don't even have to be involved for epic failure.
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Re:A one word answer (Score:5, Informative)
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Two Word Answer: Patient Safety (Score:5, Insightful)
When I'm unable to get to the network for some reason, I feel extra stupid as a developer. I can't search for code examples on Google, migrate code to staging servers, and so on. Healthcare is similar, with providers not being as effective as if they had their full EMR at their fingertips.
Turning away patients results in loss of income, so they're basically losing money in order to improve the safety of their patients.
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Re:Two Word Answer: Patient Safety (Score:5, Informative)
If a patient is immediate harm and in need of triage they take the paitient regardless. They don't even get to trying to pull meidcal records till they are in the door.
I've worked and grew up in hospitals all my life with an RN for a mother, aunt, with brother in central services, maintinance, even a dental assistant. I grew up litterally at Saint Joseph's hospital in Saint Paul (Back when the nuns ran it).
The majority of turn aways I have seen in my life (I still paint part time at hospitals and clinics), computer or otherwise, which many people do not understand, is transfer paitents.
If a hospital has 40 beds lets say and they need to try and keep 5 beds open for intake at 39 paitients it may be necessary to transfer patients based on needs but are prefectly stable and not in immediate danger. For rural hospitals this is a must (some as few at 10 beds). If the system is down, they cannot process the transfer and pull the records. It is in the paitent's best interests to be returned to the original hospital. Without the transfer of information, no one at the new hospital would even know what is wrong with their new patient.
In over 30 years I've never heard of a patient dying as a result of a down system. I HAVE see several cases where someone died as a result of not getting transferred to a specialist but not as the result of a computer failure.
Specifically I remember a story of a patient that needed to be transfered to Rochester. (This may or may not have been Saint Joseph's, I got it from a Cardio doc when I was young) Due to his condition (I was not privvy to that mind you) he had to be air lifted. The problem was, weather. They waited 10 minutes to see if it was going to clear up. It only got worse and with hail they couldn't drive him there either. His family had to sit there with the staff and basically watch him die. They simply didn't have the equipment nor the surgeon needed apparently.
Medical care is not a simple system and there are far more factors that no one can control. The creed "Do no harm" may mean sending patients back or not accepting them at all.
At a level 1 Trauma center (say Region's Hospital) may have a requirement of having X number of beds open. They would likely transfer to Saint Joe's or Saint Johns. If Saint Johns filled while the patient was enroute then the ambluance might get bumped the the Woodbury hospital or bounced to St. Joes. They may also get bounced to HCMC. It all depends on the condition of the patient. Hug your HUC (Hospital Unit Corrdinator) and intake nurse and staff.
Region's also has a better burn unit for recovery so it may be that a burn victim at St. John's might need to be transferred to Regions if they developed complications as they may be better equipped to handle the recovery.
Patients can get moved around, showing up in an ambulance doesn't imply you are an fresh intake suffering from trauma.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's Not Just Any Beaurocracy (Score:5, Insightful)
In an ER, "paperwork" includes information on whether they'll kill you if they give you a certain drug or transfusion. Stuff like that.
Re:It's Not Just Any Beaurocracy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:It's Not Just Any Beaurocracy (Score:5, Informative)
"Turning away ambulances" is not how it really happens. Let me describe it for you:
The hospital determines it is nearing its capacity to handle emergent cases. The hospital contacts the regional EMS dispatch to let them know. In my area, this is the county Fire Control. When an ambulance calls in that they have arrived on scene, the dispatcher will say, in this case, "Methodist Hospital is the only closed facility." The crew will let the patient know that they can't take them to that hospital. Also, when the crew calls dispatch for a clearance to transport the patient, if the hospital they are going to is closed, dispatch will tell them so (in NY, a patient can demand to be transported to even a closed hospital, but we do our best to convince them to go somewhere else). A hospital ED cannot turn away patients at the door, even if they come by ambulance.
So what if its a truly life threatening situation that can't be stabilized in the field? Say, full cardiac arrest, or uncontrollable arterial bleed? The ambulance will go to the closest facility, even if that is the closed facility, and will not be turned away. The ambulance will contact the receiving hospital directly and give a report on route, giving the hospital time to clear an appropriate room and mobilize the necessary staff to receive the patient.
Hospitals can close for a lot of reasons. Sometimes, a few staff members call in sick and they can't find coverage, so the capacity of the system is reduced. Sometimes a lot of patients come in all at once. Sometimes the hospital's support systems like EMR fail, but it could even be their admissions and billing system that decides to fail and causes the hospital to divert patients. It happens, but the system is designed to handle it.
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Treating patients in a vacuum (Score:5, Insightful)
It may not be necessary, but it is a cautious move. Information is important when treating patients. Their history is important. When making decisions on what treatments to provide the doctors consider the patient's history. If you do not have their history and a nearby hospital does then it seems like an easy choice to send the patient elsewhere.
Post comments on article moderation goes down (Score:4, Informative)
That headline makes no sense.
In need of a form cycle system (Score:5, Interesting)
The hospital I work for is implimenting a form cycle that allows forms to be printed and scaned back to the EMR. Such a system woudl allow my hospital to use the old paper system but maintain the records electronicly if there was ever a temporary interuption of the EMR.
Not a huge deal (Score:5, Informative)
As for paper vs. electronic records, hospitals keep both. The point is that paper records take a lot longer to manage, and if they can safely do so, it's in everyone's best interest for them to send patients to other hospitals in order to get caught up on paperwork. If their paperwork keeps piling up, the chances of losing important data increase by a large margin, and that's bad for all parties involved.
No, I say that Methodist made the right call here.
Nothing to see here ... move along.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Hospitals are businesses and have to make money. If they don't get accurate records, they can't bill the insurance companies. While this is an indication of issues with a specific hospital's computer and backup systems and a possible risk with other hospitals, I see no cause for alarm.
I recently had to go to emergency for severe stomach pains and ended up having my gall bladder taken out. I had to wait 5 hours for a room because they were 'code purple'. All beds in hospital and emergency were full. I hope they were turning away non-critical patients also. I wouldn't be surprised if this happens far more often than what the news story reported.
It's here! (Score:3, Funny)
I've been waiting for this news for years. Computers that perform fellatio? YES!
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those...
Patients turned away? (Score:4, Informative)
So what if the headline is worded funny (Score:4, Informative)
It doesn't matter that the headline is worded funny, because the majority of you responding so far obviously did not RTFA. But then why should I be surprised, this being Slashdot and all.
If you had read the article, you would know that the hospital only requested that ambulances *in route to the hospital* reroute to other area hospitals (and Indianapolis has no shortage of hospitals). Patients who were already there were not turned away, and patients who showed up using methods other than ambulances were not turned away.
Workflow (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is not so much access to historical records in these situations as it is workflow. After all, a patient sent to another hospital will not have the benefit of medical history records created at another hospital or clinic.
Workflow is where there is trouble. If you're reading this you probably use a GPS or Google maps to get around, probably both. Do you still have any paper roadmaps? I don't. Your process for getting to a new place depends on the technology. Same with hospitals. They increasingly depend on automated workflows for scheduling, for dispensing drugs, for managing lab and x-ray orders and results, and so on.
Hospitals have switched to these systems because they require fewer staff. They have largely dismantled the paper+clipboard+courier systems that preceded them. These older systems were complex and cannot be resurrected quickly. There aren't enough people to implement them. The institutional memory on how to use them is lost.
I would guess that, in this particular case, they've gone back to paper prescriptions, signed by doctors, and taken by courier to the pharmacy, with a paper label on the dispensed drugs. That must be scary, because all the safeguards in the automated system -- checks for allergies, interactions, appropriate dosage for patient weight, not to mention barcode scans at multiple points to guard against mistakes -- are gone. Who will do the manual crosschecking? Have they been trained?
As Isaac Asimov once wrote, ""I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them."
Patient Participation.. (Score:4, Informative)
This is the biggest reason I can point out for a patient to be an ACTIVE participant in knowing what their treatment is in a hospital or other medical facility with electronic record systems. You need to know what you're supposed to be getting and when. If you don't, you should be asking questions until you get satisfactory answers.
Re:they don't (Score:5, Informative)
It's a reply that WILL get you karma from "fight-the-machine", "vaccines-cause-autism", and "they're-hiding-cures" crowd... but one that has no bearing at all on reality, and only reflects your ignorant disdain for the healthcare system.
The reason why they can't operate without the electronic system likely has to do with the mountains of required documentation that needs to be filled out for every patient, and the fear that without the electronic system they may miss a counter-indication and kill a patient, whose family will then proceed to sue the hospital, the software company, and the universe for three thousand gazillion dollars. If the patient is stable and there is another hospital nearby, why risk it?
P.S. If you think that a hospital would have trouble billing people without the electronic records, and that they'd turn away the ($1000 minimum) ER patients because of that, you're delusional.
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Re:they don't (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok.
I'm sorry your child has autism. It must be harder than I can imagine. And I know that you're looking to blame an external force for this condition. But you're looking in the wrong place.
Vaccines didn't give your child autism, and they're not going to make him worse. YOU gave your child autism... or the other parent did... or probably both.
This terrible condition has NOTHING to do with vaccines, as has been shown DOZENS of times now, to the tune of countless millions of dollars that could've been spent trying to actually fix the problem, as opposed to trying to prove something that was already known to the people who won't believe the studies anyway.
By denying basic healthcare to your child, you're in no way protecting him, but rather endangering him, as well as the other children he comes in contact with. That is both selfish, and stupid.
And if you think the entire medical and scientific community is trying to force you to do something, and is concealing "the truth (tm)" from you, then why seek any professional medical care at all. After all, I am sure you can find a site on the internet that will tell you that antibiotics cause autism. Think about that, next time you're dealing with pneumonia.
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Re:they don't (Score:5, Informative)
Because this hasn't had an impact on your life, you have had no motivation to get educated.
I happen to hold multiple degrees in biology.
In fact, please stop speaking about autism at all. You lack standing, and are failing to educate yourself.
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means. It certainly does not mean reading blogs on the internet.
I prefer properly controlled, peer-reviewed studies. Here's a review of such:
Vaccines and autism: evidence does not support a causal association.
Clin Pharmacol Ther. 2007 Dec;82(6):756-9. Epub 2007 Oct
If the traits exist genetically, and are passed from generation to generation, why did this condition rapidly advance in the past few decades?
The only conclusion that supports the rapid increase in the number of diagnosable cases of autism is that 'something new' is causing it. Something changed and now we're seeing more of it.
I am not sure it has advanced. It's quite likely that it has become diagnosed more often due to a better understanding of diagnostic criteria and the accompanying campaign of educating physicians.
Unless you fiddle with the data, this is absolutely the conclusion that needs to be drawn first.
Actually, you yourself said what kind of a conclusion can be drawn given the current data:
There is no known cause for autism.
Period.
Again, there is no known cause for autism.
I assume, though, that you're going to say the diagnosis rates aren't real because the diagnosis is over-used. Next you'll say my son isn't autistic - he's just a brat.
You're defensive because you're clinging to a comfortable idea. I'll let you reply to you:
Again, this doesn't withstand logical scrutiny.
Exactly.
SOMETHING changed, sir. And until you're ready to accept, at minimum, the possibility please do the world a favor and shut the hell up.
This is a perfect example of the kind of attitude that has become so prevalent recently (hey, maybe that's what the vaccines cause). I feel no obligation to accept the possibility of something that has been repeatedly shown to be false.
Insensitive? The only thing I am insensitive to, is your own ignorance.
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Re:they don't (Score:4, Informative)
Speaking with you, sir, is akin to addressing a wall.
1. The cause of autism is unknown.
2. We do, however, know that vaccines ARE NOT the cause.
The two concepts are only contradictory in your mind.
That's pretty much as far as I am willing to go in conversing with you. As R. A. Heinlein wrote:
Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig.
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