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On
the Bleeding Edge Busy
emergency rooms are
vital sources of leadership and ideas for the health information
exchange
movement Published on Sept. 10 2007, Burgeoning business In a 2006 report, The Future of Emergency Care in the U.S. Health System, the Instiute of Medicine wrote: Not only has the hospital ED become the place that Americans turn to first when they have an illness or injury that demands immediate attention, but it has been given an increasing number of other responsibilities as well. EDs today provide much of the medical care for patients without medical insurance. Insured patients increasingly turn to the ED during times when their physician is unavailable, such as evenings and weekends, and they are often sent to the ED for tests and procedures that their physician can't easily perform in the office. In some rural communities, the hospital ED may be the main source of health care for a large percentage of residents. EDs also play a key role in public health surveillance and in disaster preparation and response. Emergency departments are highly motivated to put in clinical automation because of the challenge of overcrowding, Halamka said. It's a need to be extraordinarily efficient. Without an automated tracking and clinical care system, it's almost impossible to manage the logistics of a very overcrowded emergency department. But although ER doctors are receptive to technology, it hasn't always served them well. When Dr. Todd Taylor worked as an ER doctor in Arizona in 2006, he used six clinical information systems and had to keep track of eight passwords that changed every 90 days. He is now a physician executive in Microsoft's Health Solutions Group. Such situations have prompted ER doctors to create a new generation of software that integrates clinical data and administrative information, such as patient location, bed availability and performance. At Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a group of doctors that included Halamka developed a dashboard system that gives doctors and other members of the ER staff a high-level view of what's happening in the department and also allows them to see specifics for a patient or function, such as when more hospital beds will be available. Generally, we believe the only way the emergency department can be run is if you're integrating every bit of data generated inside and outside the emergency department in one place where doctors can look at it without having to log in to 27 different systems, and that's what the dashboard does, Halamka said. Some of the doctors have created a commercial version of the software that a company called Forerun markets to other emergency departments as an integrated information system. |