I realize it's been quite a while since I taught - or was in school myself - but I'm distressed…
Morning Headlines 4/21/14
Heading off the alarms at Boston Children’s Hospital
Boston Children’s Hospital is piloting a predictive analytics tool in its cardiac ICU that it hopes will help combat alarm fatigue by predicting changes in patient condition before alarms sound, and then creating a real-time "heat map" of the unit that tells staff where resources should be directed next.
Scribes Are Back, Helping Doctors Tackle Electronic Medical Records
NPR reports on the medical scribe industry in the US, which is booming in parallel with EHRs.
Researchers at Harvard Medical School find that flu outbreaks can be predicted by monitoring spikes in traffic to Wikipedia pages about the flu and flu-like symptoms. The resulting annual figures were in line with CDC reports, and far outperformed Google Flu Trends, which predicts outbreak numbers based on Google search terms.
Obamacare enrollees urged to change passwords over Heartbleed bug
Healthcare.gov posted a message on Saturday informing users that all passwords had been automatically reset in response to the Heartbleed computer virus.
I don’t like this increasing prevalence of scribes in the ED and other locations because of the game of telephone that occurs, plus the need to cosign everything, but I recognize that this is driven by the need for speed. Sure, physicians need to get used to EMRs, but then EMRs also need to turn their focus to usability. (I don’t see how one can have CPOE with a scribe, but I don’t think the departments who hire scribes are worried about whether they have pure CPOE. Will future regulations in favor of CPOE kill/prune these scribes?)
Here’s an interesting article from last October courageously contrasting Epic/Cerner with VA Vista.
Any guidance / feedback from the readers on VA Vista EHR installed in NON-VA organizations ? in NON-governmental organizations ?
VA Vista – Good, bad, ugly ?
the link …
http://www.openhealthnews.com/hotnews/vista-rivals-epic-and-cerner-major-deployments-ehr-systems
Are not the scribes defeating the original purpose of CPOE and EHR, which was to avoid non physicians from performing the critical functions to avoid errors?
Thus, why not simply have the patient care unit secretaries do the work, as they had for decades?
I do not get it.
It’s not a courageous article. It’s a biased article in the “Open Health News”.
That’s like taking a comparison document from Cerner’s web site and saying it is unbiased.
@Keith McItkin, PhD. — yes! Exactly! These health systems just swap one kind of non-MD, non-credentialed user entering data (created by the MD) for another.