Giving a patient medications in the ER, having them pop positive on a test, and then withholding further medications because…
The Skeptical Convert 3/11/13
Four-Letter Words
An EMR can work well but it can work not so well. I want to try to show you what I mean and not tell you, so I will do this with no words that are long, no more than 4 type hits per word. Why do this? In my head I know why but it is hard to say here just yet. And you can see now how hard it can be to work this way, but I will try to keep to my task.
When you use an EMR to pick out words you want to pick them off of a list. This can be easy if you do not know how to type, but it is not easy to say what you mean all of the time. A list may take you down a road you do not want to go onto, and the way they set an EMR up, a word down the line may not fit with the word up at the top. I see this all of the time when I do my work on the gut and find a word that is what I want to say, but up over top of it is a word I do not want to say and I can not get out of it.
But what is good when you use a list like that is that all who use it have some way to do it in the same way. They may not all do that but they can do it if they want to. Thus there is some way to make the word sets look and feel the same, so that when you look at it you know where to look to see what you want to see when you want to see it. I also like it, when I work, when I can see what I do, and go back and fix it when I want to say more of what I get in my head as I work.
The idea here is a very big idea and many have had much to say on it for many a year, back more than the year one AD in fact. But I go on too far away from my goal.
On one side I want all the word sets to look and feel the same, but on side two I want to say what I want to say that only I can say. What to do, EMR man? I see that you set it up so that I can do them both if I want to. Is that good? Do we do more good if we all look the same, or do we do more good if some do it a way that they want to and some do it a way that they want to. Is it good to read talk in a way you do talk, or to read some talk in a way you do not talk? I do not know.
But it can be a good thing to work with a limit.
Oh hell wait…
Robert D. Lafsky, MD is a gastroenterologist and internist in Lansdowne, VA.
Dr. Lafsky, that was very hard to read and get (as a 3 letter word which means “understand”).
I’d like to suggest you use all the words you want and let Apixio extract the knowledge and distribute it to the computers (“analytics programs” )that only understand 4 letter words (“discrete or coded data”) !!!!
Regards,
-imran
That was very good.
Wow. Telling.
That was pain full.