What do the airline industry and health care have in common?

There’s a short video making the rounds that compares health care to the airline industry, looking at data and information sharing. Click here to watch this short video:

It’s humorous, and worth watching. Sadly, it’s also very true. In this time of extreme high-tech capabilities, the ability of health care workers to access or share information about a patient continues to be sorely lacking. Does it matter? Yes it does and it is something our hospitals are working on fixing for you the patient. A few short examples below are scenarios that can be resolved through a meaningful use of the electronic health record and hospitals who are focused on improving coordination of care:

1. A female patient enters your emergency department with abdominal pain. She notes that the symptoms are similar to a spell she had six weeks ago, while she was visiting her mom out of town. At that time, she went to the urgi-center and underwent numerous xrays and blood tests, and was told that she could go home. You, the doctor, cannot access those records, since the urgi-center only uses paper charts. As a result, you will need to perform studies that are potentially unnecessary.

2. A man enters your emergency room after a motor vehicle accident that had occurred the prior day. He had gone to another hospital and underwent numerous CT scans. Now, due to persistent discomfort, he has come to your hospital for a “second opinion.” Your electronic record does not “talk” to the electronic record at the other hospital, so you cannot access the results of the CT scans. Your next step, after your physical exam of the patient, is to duplicate the studies.

3. An elderly patient is admitted with pneumonia. You order a pneumococcal vaccination. Since you cannot access the patient’s office records, you don’t realize that he received the vaccination only four weeks ago.

Cost, excess radiation exposure, pain and suffering, wasted time, delayed diagnoses…yep, it matters. That is one reason our hospital is working to make health care more human again and reducing the pain, waiting and improving coordination of care for our patients.

Hopefully, the national focus on the meaningful use of electronic medical records will reduce the likelihood that the scenarios suggested above will perpetuate into the distant future. It’s about time we got serious over this issue. I hope we have the willpower and the backbone, as a society, to seize the electronic data sharing opportunity and use it to improve the lives in the communities we serve.

- Dr. Joe Prosser, chief quality officer