A few months ago, during a routine physical for school, I was handed a tablet and asked to check all of my information and answer a series of questions. While it has been a few years since I had to visit the doctor, I was shocked that a single floor at the UPMC hospital had several devices floating around and everything had gone paperless. I was pleasantly surprise when I found out I could be emailed test results and access my vaccine records from their website. (The shock might have come from the fact that I had been working with several very low budget clinics over the last few months and some still relied on paper charts because the network was not always reliable).
If memory serves me correct, all hospitals and health care facilities are supposed to go paperless and implement electronic medical records by 2015 (don't quote me on that year, but I know that it is coming up). As a result, my nursing buddies and I have become good buddies with something lovingly referred to as a cow (you may have seen one during a recent visit to the hospital). This computer on wheels makes it easy to roll the electronic medical records with you from room to room (not all units have computers in each patient's room) and is super helpful when we have to find patients and record their locations on the unit. It will be interesting to see how some of the smaller agencies make the switch and even more so to see what problems arise with such a drastic change in record keeping. Like all grand transitions, unforeseen problems always seem to pop up. People and organizations have to think quickly on their feet and find cost effective solutions to said problems.
Check out some other articles about how technology is being integrated into the health care field:
- Texting the Teenage Patient
- Rise of App Development: Device Use Creates a Perfect Storm for Chronic Disease Prevention
- Integrating Technology Into Health Care What Will It Take?
- Importance of Health Information Technology, Electronic Health Records, and Continuously Aggregating Data to Comparative Effectiveness Research and Learning Health Care
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