Coming of age in the 1980s when Pac-Man was the newest rage, the pager has survived and evolved over three decades. It stubbornly remains a key piece of hospital communication at a time when a doctor without a smartphone has a technology dinosaur vibe. "We can have a robot assisting with surgery, yet we're still using pagers," said April Zepeda, spokeswoman for The Everett Clinic. Providence Regional Medical Center Everett has nearly a thousand pagers in use.
Dozens of hospitals across the country, including St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and Le Bonheur in Memphis, lost access to crucial electronic medical records for about five hours during a major computer outage last month, raising fresh concerns about whether poorly designed technology can compromise patient care. Cerner Corp. said "human error" caused the outage July 23 that it said affected an unspecified number of hospitals.
Patients' lengths of stay in Columbus Regional Hospital's emergency department doubled in late June during a switch to an electronic records system, and times are still longer than usual despite improvements, hospital officials said. The emergency department, which had used a paper system for recording patient information, switched to an electronic system the week of June 24. The hospital, as a whole, is switching to a new electronic health records system to meet the requirements of the 2009 economic stimulus legislation, which provided incentives for using electronic health records. The benefit of electronic health records is that patient information has to be entered only once and can be shared by the various departments of the hospital, said Ron Latta, the hospital's information services director.
Dignity Health is partnering with the Arizona State Physicians Association (ASPA) to provide independent physicians access to a health information exchange through an accountable care organization. The information exchange, called Phoenix Connected Community, will connect users with the MobileMD protected information transfer mechanism used by Dignity Health and other physicians. The goal is to reduce costs, improve patient care and meet Affordable Care Act requirements. Dignity Health is applying to create an affordable care organization jointly with Vanguard Health Systems.
A new study suggests that using electronic health records to tell doctors what infections are going around in their community could help cut down on unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions. Dr. Ari Robicsek from NorthShore University HealthSystem in Evanston, Illinois, who worked on the new study, and his colleagues used electronic health records to look back at 28,000 patients who saw one of 69 doctors at NorthShore's hospitals and clinics during flu seasons between 2006 and 2011. On average, those doctors prescribed an antibiotic for patients complaining of a fever and cough or cold symptoms 45 percent of the time, according to the findings published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Dozens of hospitals across the country lost access to crucial electronic medical records for about five hours during a major computer outage last week, raising fresh concerns about whether poorly designed technology can compromise patient care. Cerner Corp., a leading supplier of electronic health records to hospitals and doctors, said "human error" caused the outage July 23 that it said affected an unspecified number of hospitals that rely on the Kansas City, Mo., company to remotely store their medical information. Adventist Health, which runs White Memorial Medical Center in Los Angeles and 18 other hospitals, and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital were among those affected by the outage.