Dr. Arthur Jey shepherded a middle-aged female patient, hunched over in pain, from the Sutter General emergency waiting area to a nearby exam room – wrapping an arm around her back as he placed her gently in a chair. He knelt on the hospital floor as he examined her aching abdomen and asked about her health history. In a corner of the room, Veronica Cordero, a medical scribe, clacked at the keyboard on her mobile workstation. With doctors such as Jey burdened by what they say are the growing demands of digital record keeping, Cordero was providing much-needed relief. Medical scribes electronically document patient visits so doctors don't have to, and they're in high demand across the country.
Back in September 2007, I created a new kind of doctor practice. The iPhone had come out three months prior, and Google had enabled you to embed your Google Calendar in a website just the month before. I saw a perfect storm of technology leading to an opportunity to do something unprecedented and become my own boss. As an amateur photographer plugged into the creative community of NYC, I had many friends who were uninsured artists and freelancers who occasionally needed health care. They couldn't afford to go to the emergency room, and there were no urgent-care centers in New York at the time. They needed an accessible, cost-effective doctor.
The lowly plate and humble utensil are getting high-tech upgrades to become tools for people watching their weight or managing diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and cancer. There are dishes that could send you smartphone alerts reminding you to use them when you enter the kitchen. Utensils that stabilize your food even as your hand shakes. Cups and spoons that aim to zap your taste buds to intensify flavor. And plates that purport to turn eating healthy into a game. The idea that plating affects the way we experience food, long exploited by high-end restaurants, has recently made its way into hospitals and hospices.
Medicine arrived late to the information age. Years after banking, travel, retail, and most other industries went digital, hospitals and doctors' offices still featured endlessly ringing telephones, indecipherable handwritten documents, and busy mailrooms. But in the last five years, spurred in part by the Affordable Care Act's mandate for electronic health records, the medical world has embraced computers as a tool as vital as stethoscopes and X-rays. This past year, Partners Healthcare spent over a billion dollars adopting Epic, a system that allows a doctor to look up test results, answer a patient's questions, communicate with consultants, write prescriptions, and bill for his or her services, all with a few clicks.
Despite widespread adoption of electronic health record systems by providers, consumers continue to be frustrated by their inability to access their digital healthcare information, according to a new survey. Under the HIPAA Privacy Rule, consumers have the right to inspect, review, and receive a copy of their medical records and billing records held by covered entities such as health plans and providers. However, a survey of more than 500 U.S. consumers planning to enroll in a 2016 health plan found that 53 percent can't access all of their health data electronically and 60 percent indicated they are unsure or do not have all of their health data stored in EHRs.
The hunt for a deadly superbug that sickened 22 patients at a Dutch hospital began just before noon on a spring day in 2012. Inside a lab in the tiny hamlet of Zoeterwoude, a technician carefully peeled back the tip of a state-of-the art medical scope. Watching him intently was a small group of hospital officials and executives from Olympus Corp., the maker of the device. The Olympus technician found trouble right away. He spotted a brown, grimy film inside parts of the flexible, snake-like scope — parts that were supposed to be sealed. A rubber ring designed to keep bacteria out was cracked and worn. The same bacteria that had sickened the patients were found on the scope.